Counting Commits in Your Git Branch

Are you curious about the total number of commits in your Git branch? While you can check this information through your user interface on platforms like GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket, there is a more efficient method available that we'll explore here.

Imagine you have a Git project with two branches: main and test. You want to find out how many commits are present in each branch. To achieve this, you can use the rev-list command. According to Git's documentation, this command is crucial for constructing and navigating commit ancestry graphs, offering various options for different tasks, including commands like git bisect and git repack.

For this guide, we'll focus on a specific feature of git rev-list, namely the --count flag. The documentation defines the --count flag as follows:

--count

Print a number stating how many commits would have been listed, and suppress all other output. When used together with --left-right, instead print the counts for left and right commits, separated by a tab. When used together with --cherry-mark, omit patch equivalent commits from these counts and print the count for equivalent commits separated by a tab.

To find out the total number of commits in your branch, simply execute the following command in your terminal, replacing branch-name with your actual branch name:

$ git rev-list --count branch-name

The output will display the total number of commits.

For instance, if we want to determine the number of commits in the main branch, we would enter the command as follows:

$ git rev-list --count main

The output might look like this:

1342

This indicates that there are 1,342 commits in the main branch—a sign of an active project!

If you wish to check the commit count for the test branch, you would run:

$ git rev-list --count test

You might see a different result, such as:

3

This means the test branch contains only 3 commits.

Overall, retrieving the number of commits in your Git branch is straightforward as long as you utilize the git rev-list command effectively. We hope this guide has been informative!