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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 --interac- tive 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 oper- ate 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 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. -U<n>, --unified=<n> Generate diffs with <n> lines of context. Defaults to diff.context or 3 if the config option is unset. --inter-hunk-context=<n> Show the context between diff hunks, up to the specified <number> of lines, thereby fusing hunks that are close to each other. Defaults to diff.interHunkContext or 0 if the config option is unset. -C <commit>, --reuse-message=<commit> Take an existing <commit> object, and reuse the log message and the au- thorship information (including the timestamp) when creating the com- mit. -c <commit>, --reedit-message=<commit> Like -C, but with -c the editor is invoked, so that the user can fur- ther edit the commit message. --fixup=[(amend|reword):]<commit> Create a new commit which "fixes up" <commit> when applied with git re- base --autosquash. Plain --fixup=<commit> creates a "fixup!" commit which changes the content of <commit> but leaves its log message un- touched. --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 title composed of "fixup!" followed by the title of <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 title is instead prefixed with "amend!". The log message of <commit> is copied into the log message of the "amend!" commit and opened in an ed- itor 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-mes- sage 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 git rebase --autosquash. The commit message title 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 con- flicting cherry-pick, declare that the authorship of the resulting com- mit now belongs to the committer. This also renews the author time- stamp. --short When doing a dry-run, give the output in the short-format. See git-sta- tus(1) for details. Implies --dry-run. --branch Show the branch and tracking info even in short-format. See git-sta- tus(1) for details. --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. This is the default output of git-status(1). Implies --dry-run. -z, --null When showing short or porcelain git-status(1) output, print the file- name 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 <file>. Use - to read the message from the standard input. --author=<author> Override the commit author. Specify an explicit author using the stan- dard A U Thor <author@example.com> format. Otherwise <author> is as- sumed to be a pattern and is used to search for an existing commit by that author (i.e. git 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 <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 <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 with- out 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 sig- noffs are used in that project. The --no-signoff option can be used to countermand an earlier --signoff option on the command line. Git does not (and will not) have a configuration variable to enable the --signoff command line option by default; see the commit.signoff entry in gitfaq(7) for more details. --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@ex- ample.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 de- tails. -n, --verify, --no-verify Bypass the pre-commit and commit-msg hooks. 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 Create a commit with an empty commit message without using plumbing commands like git-commit-tree(1). Like --allow-empty, this command is primarily for use by foreign SCM interface scripts. --cleanup=<mode> Determine 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, com- mentary 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 Let the user further edit the message taken from <file> with -F <file>, command line with -m <message>, and from <commit> with -C <commit>. --no-edit Use the selected commit message without launching an editor. For exam- ple, 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 con- tents 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 re- quired, and an empty commit will be created. --pathspec-from-file=<file> Pass pathspec in <file> instead of commandline args. If <file> is ex- actly - then standard input is used. Pathspec elements are separated by LF or CR/LF. Pathspec elements can be quoted as explained for the con- figuration 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 sepa- rated 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 de- fault is normal, i.e. show untracked files and directories. The possible options are: no Show no untracked files normal Shows untracked files and directories 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.showUntracked- Files 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 commit- ted, 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 tem- plate when using an editor to prepare the default commit message. -S[<key-id>], --gpg-sign[=<key-id>], --no-gpg-sign GPG-sign commits. The <key-id> is optional and defaults to the commit- ter identity; if specified, it must be stuck to the option without a space. --no-gpg-sign is useful to countermand both commit.gpgSign con- figuration 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 work- ing 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 com- mitted 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 ex- pected. After a merge (initiated by git merge or git pull) stops because of con- flicts, 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, be- cause 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-con- fig(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 char- acter as well. Fractional parts of a second will be ignored, for exam- ple 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, fol- lowed 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. * The contents of the blob objects are uninterpreted sequences of bytes. There is no encoding translation at the core level. * 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 com- mand line arguments, environment variables and config files (.git/con- fig (see git-config(1)), gitignore(5), gitattributes(5) and gitmod- ules(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. * 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 conve- nient 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 mes- sage 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.com- mitEncoding 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-cod- ing 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-con- fig(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 com- mit. Changing the default can be useful when you always want to keep lines that begin with the comment character (core.commentChar, default #) in your log message, in which case you would do git config com- mit.cleanup whitespace (note that you will have to remove the help lines that begin with the comment character 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 com- mit message template when using an editor to prepare the commit mes- sage. 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. HOOKS This command can run commit-msg, prepare-commit-msg, pre-commit, post-com- mit 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 mes- sage 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 in- vocation 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 2.53.0 2026-02-01 GIT-COMMIT(1)
NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | OPTIONS | EXAMPLES | COMMIT INFORMATION | DATE FORMATS | DISCUSSION | ENVIRONMENT AND CONFIGURATION VARIABLES | HOOKS | FILES | SEE ALSO | GIT
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