GIT-COMMIT(1) Git Manual GIT-COMMIT(1)

NAME

git-commit - Record changes to the repository

SYNOPSIS

git commit [-a | --interactive | --patch] [-s] [-v] [-u<mode>] [--amend]
[--dry-run] [(-c | -C | --squash) <commit> | --fixup [(amend|reword):]<commit>]
[-F <file> | -m <msg>] [--reset-author] [--allow-empty]
[--allow-empty-message] [--no-verify] [-e] [--author=<author>]
[--date=<date>] [--cleanup=<mode>] [--[no-]status]
[-i | -o] [--pathspec-from-file=<file> [--pathspec-file-nul]]
[(--trailer <token>[(=|:)<value>])...] [-S[<keyid>]]
[--] [<pathspec>...]

DESCRIPTION

Create a new commit containing the current contents of the index and
the given log message describing the changes. The new commit is a
direct child of HEAD, usually the tip of the current branch, and the
branch is updated to point to it (unless no branch is associated with
the working tree, in which case HEAD is "detached" as described in
git-checkout(1)).

The content to be committed can be specified in several ways:

1. by using git-add(1) to incrementally "add" changes to the index
before using the commit command (Note: even modified files must
be "added");

2. by using git-rm(1) to remove files from the working tree and the
index, again before using the commit command;

3. by listing files as arguments to the commit command (without
--interactive or --patch switch), in which case the commit will
ignore changes staged in the index, and instead record the
current content of the listed files (which must already be known
to Git);

4. by using the -a switch with the commit command to automatically
"add" changes from all known files (i.e. all files that are
already listed in the index) and to automatically "rm" files in
the index that have been removed from the working tree, and then
perform the actual commit;

5. by using the --interactive or --patch switches with the commit
command to decide one by one which files or hunks should be part
of the commit in addition to contents in the index, before
finalizing the operation. See the "Interactive Mode" section of
git-add(1) to learn how to operate these modes.

The --dry-run option can be used to obtain a summary of what is
included by any of the above for the next commit by giving the same
set of parameters (options and paths).

If you make a commit and then find a mistake immediately after that,
you can recover from it with git reset.

OPTIONS

-a, --all
Tell the command to automatically stage files that have been
modified and deleted, but new files you have not told Git about
are not affected.

-p, --patch
Use the interactive patch selection interface to choose which
changes to commit. See git-add(1) for details.

-C <commit>, --reuse-message=<commit>
Take an existing commit object, and reuse the log message and the
authorship information (including the timestamp) when creating
the commit.

-c <commit>, --reedit-message=<commit>
Like -C, but with -c the editor is invoked, so that the user can
further edit the commit message.

--fixup=[(amend|reword):]<commit>
Create a new commit which "fixes up" <commit> when applied with
git rebase --autosquash. Plain --fixup=<commit> creates a
"fixup!" commit which changes the content of <commit> but leaves
its log message untouched. --fixup=amend:<commit> is similar but
creates an "amend!" commit which also replaces the log message of
<commit> with the log message of the "amend!" commit.
--fixup=reword:<commit> creates an "amend!" commit which replaces
the log message of <commit> with its own log message but makes no
changes to the content of <commit>.

The commit created by plain --fixup=<commit> has a subject
composed of "fixup!" followed by the subject line from <commit>,
and is recognized specially by git rebase --autosquash. The -m
option may be used to supplement the log message of the created
commit, but the additional commentary will be thrown away once
the "fixup!" commit is squashed into <commit> by git rebase
--autosquash.

The commit created by --fixup=amend:<commit> is similar but its
subject is instead prefixed with "amend!". The log message of
<commit> is copied into the log message of the "amend!" commit
and opened in an editor so it can be refined. When git rebase
--autosquash squashes the "amend!" commit into <commit>, the log
message of <commit> is replaced by the refined log message from
the "amend!" commit. It is an error for the "amend!" commit's log
message to be empty unless --allow-empty-message is specified.

--fixup=reword:<commit> is shorthand for --fixup=amend:<commit>
--only. It creates an "amend!" commit with only a log message
(ignoring any changes staged in the index). When squashed by git
rebase --autosquash, it replaces the log message of <commit>
without making any other changes.

Neither "fixup!" nor "amend!" commits change authorship of
<commit> when applied by git rebase --autosquash. See git-
rebase(1) for details.

--squash=<commit>
Construct a commit message for use with rebase --autosquash. The
commit message subject line is taken from the specified commit
with a prefix of "squash! ". Can be used with additional commit
message options (-m/-c/-C/-F). See git-rebase(1) for details.

--reset-author
When used with -C/-c/--amend options, or when committing after a
conflicting cherry-pick, declare that the authorship of the
resulting commit now belongs to the committer. This also renews
the author timestamp.

--short
When doing a dry-run, give the output in the short-format. See
git-status(1) for details. Implies --dry-run.

--branch
Show the branch and tracking info even in short-format.

--porcelain
When doing a dry-run, give the output in a porcelain-ready
format. See git-status(1) for details. Implies --dry-run.

--long
When doing a dry-run, give the output in the long-format. Implies
--dry-run.

-z, --null
When showing short or porcelain status output, print the filename
verbatim and terminate the entries with NUL, instead of LF. If no
format is given, implies the --porcelain output format. Without
the -z option, filenames with "unusual" characters are quoted as
explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see git-
config(1)).

-F <file>, --file=<file>
Take the commit message from the given file. Use - to read the
message from the standard input.

--author=<author>
Override the commit author. Specify an explicit author using the
standard A U Thor <author@example.com> format. Otherwise <author>
is assumed to be a pattern and is used to search for an existing
commit by that author (i.e. rev-list --all -i --author=<author>);
the commit author is then copied from the first such commit
found.

--date=<date>
Override the author date used in the commit.

-m <msg>, --message=<msg>
Use the given <msg> as the commit message. If multiple -m options
are given, their values are concatenated as separate paragraphs.

The -m option is mutually exclusive with -c, -C, and -F.

-t <file>, --template=<file>
When editing the commit message, start the editor with the
contents in the given file. The commit.template configuration
variable is often used to give this option implicitly to the
command. This mechanism can be used by projects that want to
guide participants with some hints on what to write in the
message in what order. If the user exits the editor without
editing the message, the commit is aborted. This has no effect
when a message is given by other means, e.g. with the -m or -F
options.

-s, --signoff, --no-signoff
Add a Signed-off-by trailer by the committer at the end of the
commit log message. The meaning of a signoff depends on the
project to which you're committing. For example, it may certify
that the committer has the rights to submit the work under the
project's license or agrees to some contributor representation,
such as a Developer Certificate of Origin. (See
https://developercertificate.org for the one used by the Linux
kernel and Git projects.) Consult the documentation or leadership
of the project to which you're contributing to understand how the
signoffs are used in that project.

The --no-signoff option can be used to countermand an earlier
--signoff option on the command line.

--trailer <token>[(=|:)<value>]
Specify a (<token>, <value>) pair that should be applied as a
trailer. (e.g. git commit --trailer "Signed-off-by:C O Mitter \
<committer@example.com>" --trailer "Helped-by:C O Mitter \
<committer@example.com>" will add the "Signed-off-by" trailer and
the "Helped-by" trailer to the commit message.) The trailer.*
configuration variables (git-interpret-trailers(1)) can be used
to define if a duplicated trailer is omitted, where in the run of
trailers each trailer would appear, and other details.

-n, --[no-]verify
By default, the pre-commit and commit-msg hooks are run. When any
of --no-verify or -n is given, these are bypassed. See also
githooks(5).

--allow-empty
Usually recording a commit that has the exact same tree as its
sole parent commit is a mistake, and the command prevents you
from making such a commit. This option bypasses the safety, and
is primarily for use by foreign SCM interface scripts.

--allow-empty-message
Like --allow-empty this command is primarily for use by foreign
SCM interface scripts. It allows you to create a commit with an
empty commit message without using plumbing commands like git-
commit-tree(1).

--cleanup=<mode>
This option determines how the supplied commit message should be
cleaned up before committing. The <mode> can be strip,
whitespace, verbatim, scissors or default.

strip
Strip leading and trailing empty lines, trailing whitespace,
commentary and collapse consecutive empty lines.

whitespace
Same as strip except #commentary is not removed.

verbatim
Do not change the message at all.

scissors
Same as whitespace except that everything from (and
including) the line found below is truncated, if the message
is to be edited. "#" can be customized with core.commentChar.

# ------------------------ >8 ------------------------

default
Same as strip if the message is to be edited. Otherwise
whitespace.

The default can be changed by the commit.cleanup configuration
variable (see git-config(1)).

-e, --edit
The message taken from file with -F, command line with -m, and
from commit object with -C are usually used as the commit log
message unmodified. This option lets you further edit the message
taken from these sources.

--no-edit
Use the selected commit message without launching an editor. For
example, git commit --amend --no-edit amends a commit without
changing its commit message.

--amend
Replace the tip of the current branch by creating a new commit.
The recorded tree is prepared as usual (including the effect of
the -i and -o options and explicit pathspec), and the message
from the original commit is used as the starting point, instead
of an empty message, when no other message is specified from the
command line via options such as -m, -F, -c, etc. The new commit
has the same parents and author as the current one (the
--reset-author option can countermand this).

It is a rough equivalent for:

$ git reset --soft HEAD^
$ ... do something else to come up with the right tree ...
$ git commit -c ORIG_HEAD

but can be used to amend a merge commit.

You should understand the implications of rewriting history if
you amend a commit that has already been published. (See the
"RECOVERING FROM UPSTREAM REBASE" section in git-rebase(1).)

--no-post-rewrite
Bypass the post-rewrite hook.

-i, --include
Before making a commit out of staged contents so far, stage the
contents of paths given on the command line as well. This is
usually not what you want unless you are concluding a conflicted
merge.

-o, --only
Make a commit by taking the updated working tree contents of the
paths specified on the command line, disregarding any contents
that have been staged for other paths. This is the default mode
of operation of git commit if any paths are given on the command
line, in which case this option can be omitted. If this option is
specified together with --amend, then no paths need to be
specified, which can be used to amend the last commit without
committing changes that have already been staged. If used
together with --allow-empty paths are also not required, and an
empty commit will be created.

--pathspec-from-file=<file>
Pathspec is passed in <file> instead of commandline args. If
<file> is exactly - then standard input is used. Pathspec
elements are separated by LF or CR/LF. Pathspec elements can be
quoted as explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath
(see git-config(1)). See also --pathspec-file-nul and global
--literal-pathspecs.

--pathspec-file-nul
Only meaningful with --pathspec-from-file. Pathspec elements are
separated with NUL character and all other characters are taken
literally (including newlines and quotes).

-u[<mode>], --untracked-files[=<mode>]
Show untracked files.

The mode parameter is optional (defaults to all), and is used to
specify the handling of untracked files; when -u is not used, the
default is normal, i.e. show untracked files and directories.

The possible options are:

+o no - Show no untracked files

+o normal - Shows untracked files and directories

+o all - Also shows individual files in untracked directories.

All usual spellings for Boolean value true are taken as normal
and false as no. The default can be changed using the
status.showUntrackedFiles configuration variable documented in
git-config(1).

-v, --verbose
Show unified diff between the HEAD commit and what would be
committed at the bottom of the commit message template to help
the user describe the commit by reminding what changes the commit
has. Note that this diff output doesn't have its lines prefixed
with #. This diff will not be a part of the commit message. See
the commit.verbose configuration variable in git-config(1).

If specified twice, show in addition the unified diff between
what would be committed and the worktree files, i.e. the unstaged
changes to tracked files.

-q, --quiet
Suppress commit summary message.

--dry-run
Do not create a commit, but show a list of paths that are to be
committed, paths with local changes that will be left uncommitted
and paths that are untracked.

--status
Include the output of git-status(1) in the commit message
template when using an editor to prepare the commit message.
Defaults to on, but can be used to override configuration
variable commit.status.

--no-status
Do not include the output of git-status(1) in the commit message
template when using an editor to prepare the default commit
message.

-S[<keyid>], --gpg-sign[=<keyid>], --no-gpg-sign
GPG-sign commits. The keyid argument is optional and defaults to
the committer identity; if specified, it must be stuck to the
option without a space. --no-gpg-sign is useful to countermand
both commit.gpgSign configuration variable, and earlier
--gpg-sign.

--
Do not interpret any more arguments as options.

<pathspec>...
When pathspec is given on the command line, commit the contents
of the files that match the pathspec without recording the
changes already added to the index. The contents of these files
are also staged for the next commit on top of what have been
staged before.

For more details, see the pathspec entry in gitglossary(7).

EXAMPLES

When recording your own work, the contents of modified files in your
working tree are temporarily stored to a staging area called the
"index" with git add. A file can be reverted back, only in the index
but not in the working tree, to that of the last commit with git
restore --staged <file>, which effectively reverts git add and
prevents the changes to this file from participating in the next
commit. After building the state to be committed incrementally with
these commands, git commit (without any pathname parameter) is used
to record what has been staged so far. This is the most basic form of
the command. An example:

$ edit hello.c
$ git rm goodbye.c
$ git add hello.c
$ git commit

Instead of staging files after each individual change, you can tell
git commit to notice the changes to the files whose contents are
tracked in your working tree and do corresponding git add and git rm
for you. That is, this example does the same as the earlier example
if there is no other change in your working tree:

$ edit hello.c
$ rm goodbye.c
$ git commit -a

The command git commit -a first looks at your working tree, notices
that you have modified hello.c and removed goodbye.c, and performs
necessary git add and git rm for you.

After staging changes to many files, you can alter the order the
changes are recorded in, by giving pathnames to git commit. When
pathnames are given, the command makes a commit that only records the
changes made to the named paths:

$ edit hello.c hello.h
$ git add hello.c hello.h
$ edit Makefile
$ git commit Makefile

This makes a commit that records the modification to Makefile. The
changes staged for hello.c and hello.h are not included in the
resulting commit. However, their changes are not lost -- they are
still staged and merely held back. After the above sequence, if you
do:

$ git commit

this second commit would record the changes to hello.c and hello.h as
expected.

After a merge (initiated by git merge or git pull) stops because of
conflicts, cleanly merged paths are already staged to be committed
for you, and paths that conflicted are left in unmerged state. You
would have to first check which paths are conflicting with git status
and after fixing them manually in your working tree, you would stage
the result as usual with git add:

$ git status | grep unmerged
unmerged: hello.c
$ edit hello.c
$ git add hello.c

After resolving conflicts and staging the result, git ls-files -u
would stop mentioning the conflicted path. When you are done, run git
commit to finally record the merge:

$ git commit

As with the case to record your own changes, you can use -a option to
save typing. One difference is that during a merge resolution, you
cannot use git commit with pathnames to alter the order the changes
are committed, because the merge should be recorded as a single
commit. In fact, the command refuses to run when given pathnames (but
see -i option).

COMMIT INFORMATION

Author and committer information is taken from the following
environment variables, if set:

GIT_AUTHOR_NAME
GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL
GIT_AUTHOR_DATE
GIT_COMMITTER_NAME
GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL
GIT_COMMITTER_DATE

(nb "<", ">" and "\n"s are stripped)

The author and committer names are by convention some form of a
personal name (that is, the name by which other humans refer to you),
although Git does not enforce or require any particular form.
Arbitrary Unicode may be used, subject to the constraints listed
above. This name has no effect on authentication; for that, see the
credential.username variable in git-config(1).

In case (some of) these environment variables are not set, the
information is taken from the configuration items user.name and
user.email, or, if not present, the environment variable EMAIL, or,
if that is not set, system user name and the hostname used for
outgoing mail (taken from /etc/mailname and falling back to the fully
qualified hostname when that file does not exist).

The author.name and committer.name and their corresponding email
options override user.name and user.email if set and are overridden
themselves by the environment variables.

The typical usage is to set just the user.name and user.email
variables; the other options are provided for more complex use cases.

DATE FORMATS

The GIT_AUTHOR_DATE and GIT_COMMITTER_DATE environment variables
support the following date formats:

Git internal format
It is <unix-timestamp> <time-zone-offset>, where <unix-timestamp>
is the number of seconds since the UNIX epoch.
<time-zone-offset> is a positive or negative offset from UTC. For
example CET (which is 1 hour ahead of UTC) is +0100.

RFC 2822
The standard date format as described by RFC 2822, for example
Thu, 07 Apr 2005 22:13:13 +0200.

ISO 8601
Time and date specified by the ISO 8601 standard, for example
2005-04-07T22:13:13. The parser accepts a space instead of the T
character as well. Fractional parts of a second will be ignored,
for example 2005-04-07T22:13:13.019 will be treated as
2005-04-07T22:13:13.

Note
In addition, the date part is accepted in the following
formats: YYYY.MM.DD, MM/DD/YYYY and DD.MM.YYYY.

In addition to recognizing all date formats above, the --date option
will also try to make sense of other, more human-centric date
formats, such as relative dates like "yesterday" or "last Friday at
noon".

DISCUSSION

Though not required, it's a good idea to begin the commit message
with a single short (no more than 50 characters) line summarizing the
change, followed by a blank line and then a more thorough
description. The text up to the first blank line in a commit message
is treated as the commit title, and that title is used throughout
Git. For example, git-format-patch(1) turns a commit into email, and
it uses the title on the Subject line and the rest of the commit in
the body.

Git is to some extent character encoding agnostic.

+o The contents of the blob objects are uninterpreted sequences of
bytes. There is no encoding translation at the core level.

+o Path names are encoded in UTF-8 normalization form C. This
applies to tree objects, the index file, ref names, as well as
path names in command line arguments, environment variables and
config files (.git/config (see git-config(1)), gitignore(5),
gitattributes(5) and gitmodules(5)).

Note that Git at the core level treats path names simply as
sequences of non-NUL bytes, there are no path name encoding
conversions (except on Mac and Windows). Therefore, using
non-ASCII path names will mostly work even on platforms and file
systems that use legacy extended ASCII encodings. However,
repositories created on such systems will not work properly on
UTF-8-based systems (e.g. Linux, Mac, Windows) and vice versa.
Additionally, many Git-based tools simply assume path names to be
UTF-8 and will fail to display other encodings correctly.

+o Commit log messages are typically encoded in UTF-8, but other
extended ASCII encodings are also supported. This includes
ISO-8859-x, CP125x and many others, but not UTF-16/32, EBCDIC and
CJK multi-byte encodings (GBK, Shift-JIS, Big5, EUC-x, CP9xx
etc.).

Although we encourage that the commit log messages are encoded in
UTF-8, both the core and Git Porcelain are designed not to force
UTF-8 on projects. If all participants of a particular project find
it more convenient to use legacy encodings, Git does not forbid it.
However, there are a few things to keep in mind.

1. git commit and git commit-tree issue a warning if the commit log
message given to it does not look like a valid UTF-8 string,
unless you explicitly say your project uses a legacy encoding.
The way to say this is to have i18n.commitEncoding in .git/config
file, like this:

[i18n]
commitEncoding = ISO-8859-1

Commit objects created with the above setting record the value of
i18n.commitEncoding in their encoding header. This is to help
other people who look at them later. Lack of this header implies
that the commit log message is encoded in UTF-8.

2. git log, git show, git blame and friends look at the encoding
header of a commit object, and try to re-code the log message
into UTF-8 unless otherwise specified. You can specify the
desired output encoding with i18n.logOutputEncoding in
.git/config file, like this:

[i18n]
logOutputEncoding = ISO-8859-1

If you do not have this configuration variable, the value of
i18n.commitEncoding is used instead.

Note that we deliberately chose not to re-code the commit log message
when a commit is made to force UTF-8 at the commit object level,
because re-coding to UTF-8 is not necessarily a reversible operation.

ENVIRONMENT AND CONFIGURATION VARIABLES

The editor used to edit the commit log message will be chosen from
the GIT_EDITOR environment variable, the core.editor configuration
variable, the VISUAL environment variable, or the EDITOR environment
variable (in that order). See git-var(1) for details.

Everything above this line in this section isn't included from the
git-config(1) documentation. The content that follows is the same as
what's found there:

commit.cleanup
This setting overrides the default of the --cleanup option in git
commit. See git-commit(1) for details. Changing the default can
be useful when you always want to keep lines that begin with the
comment character # in your log message, in which case you would
do git config commit.cleanup whitespace (note that you will have
to remove the help lines that begin with # in the commit log
template yourself, if you do this).

commit.gpgSign
A boolean to specify whether all commits should be GPG signed.
Use of this option when doing operations such as rebase can
result in a large number of commits being signed. It may be
convenient to use an agent to avoid typing your GPG passphrase
several times.

commit.status
A boolean to enable/disable inclusion of status information in
the commit message template when using an editor to prepare the
commit message. Defaults to true.

commit.template
Specify the pathname of a file to use as the template for new
commit messages.

commit.verbose
A boolean or int to specify the level of verbosity with git
commit. See git-commit(1).

HOOKS

This command can run commit-msg, prepare-commit-msg, pre-commit,
post-commit and post-rewrite hooks. See githooks(5) for more
information.

FILES

$GIT_DIR/COMMIT_EDITMSG
This file contains the commit message of a commit in progress. If
git commit exits due to an error before creating a commit, any
commit message that has been provided by the user (e.g., in an
editor session) will be available in this file, but will be
overwritten by the next invocation of git commit.

SEE ALSO

git-add(1), git-rm(1), git-mv(1), git-merge(1), git-commit-tree(1)

GIT

Part of the git(1) suite

Git 2.48.1 2025-01-13 GIT-COMMIT(1)