Git Log

In order to list all of the previous commits, you can use the following command:

git log

This will provide you with your commit history, the output would look like this:

commit da46ce39a3fd663ff802d013f834431d4b4159a5 (HEAD -> main)
Author: Bobby Iliev <bobby@bobbyiliev.com>
Date:   Fri Mar 12 17:14:02 2021 +0000

    Update README.md

commit fa583473b4be2807b45f35b755aa84ac78922259
Author: Bobby Iliev <bobby@bobbyiliev.com>
Date:   Fri Mar 12 17:01:17 2021 +0000

    Initial commit

The entries are listed, in order, from most recent to oldest.

Rundown of the output:

commit da46ce39a3fd663ff802d013f834431d4b4159a5: Here you can see the specific commit ID
Author: Bobby Iliev... : Then you can see who created the changes
Date: Fri Mar 12...: After that, you’ve got the exact time and date when the commit was created
Finally, you have the commit message. This is one of the reasons why it is important to write short and descriptive commit messages so that later on, you could tell what changes were introduced by the particular commit.

If you want to check the differences between the current state of your repository and a particular commit, what you could do is use the git diff command followed by the commit ID:

git diff fa583473b4be2807b45f35b755aa84ac78922259

In my case the output will be the following:

diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index 9366068..2b14655 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -1 +1,2 @@
 # Demo Project
+Git is awesome

So the difference between that specific commit and the current state of the repository is the change in the README.md file.

In case that you wanted to see only the commit IDs and commit messages on one line, you could add the --oneline argument:

git log --oneline

Output:

* da46ce3 (HEAD -> main) Update README.md
* fa58347 Initial commit

With that, you now know how to check your commit history! Next, let’s go ahead and learn how to exclude specific files from Git!