How to find all the commits made on a branch?

[Benjamin Fernandez]

Hi, I have a GIT project with more than 2000 branches and more than 2000 commits.

There are a branch called "1595", I don't know who made it, when was merged, or wich files are affected, so, I am looking for any way to "search" all the commits made on this branch, and then find all the files affected by their commits.

There are any way to do it using Sourcetree or Bitbucket?

[Seth · Accepted solution]

Git doesn't track information like that. A branch is just a named reference to a commit, and if you commit to a branch, it moves that reference.

What you can do is see all of the commits that are ancestors of that branch, but many of those will have been committed to other branches that either pre-dated your "1595", or were merged into it.

To do that in SourceTree, checkout that branch. In the log view, use the dropdown at the top to view "current branch". If you merge frequently, you may be able to use merge commit descriptions to get a rough idea of what branch sections of older commits belong to.

There may be a better way to do this using a git command line, but this isn't the best forum for those questions.

[Benjamin Fernandez]

Thank you for your help, I always imagined a branch like a "group" of commits, now I understand it better, selecting "current branch" on the dropdown was a great way to find what I need.

[thinsoldier]

I vaguely remember a blog post about a post-commit script that would automatically add a git-note containing the name of the current branch whenever the author made a commit. Something like that might be useful to you in the future.

[Mohammed Asif, Nabil]

@Benjamin Fernandez You can! Using the tag:

?until=refs/heads/<branch-name>

My example:

curl -u <user>:<pass> -X GET "https://stash.xxx.com/rest/api/latest/projects/<project-key>/repos/<repo-slug>/commits?until=refs/heads/feature/ALMENGI-460"

[nmaqsudov]

I'm not quite sure if this would be absolutely robust for anybody, I use the following way:

1. Checkout to the branch that has at least one commit
2. git rev-list --simplify-by-decoration -2 HEAD
   this gives me just two SHAs: 1) last commit of the branch [C1] 2) and commit parent to the first commit of the branch [C2]
3. git log --decorate --pretty=oneline --reverse --name-status <C2>..<C1>
   Now I get a list of full history of file changing within the branch
   
   

[Connor Lee]

Hello Naeel,

Would you mind explaining your step 2 here? I'm using your answer to write a ruby script that will list all files changed on a branch that has not yet been merged into the development branch, the relevant snippit looks like this:

commit_range = `(git rev-list --simplify-by-decoration -2 HEAD)`
                   .split(/\n+/)
committed_files = `git log --pretty=format:'' --name-only #{commit_range[1]}..#{commit_range[0]}`
                      .split(/\n+/)
                      .uniq

I'm just having trouble understanding what's going on? If I exclude --simplify-by-decoration, I get the same hashes, but I'm not sure if that's necessarily always going to to be the case. It works as expected but I'm asking to see if there are any edge cases I should be aware of?

[Hennie El Amam]

Another option is via stash/bitbucket. 

1- create a pull request for the branch

2- select source and destination features

3-  at the bottom of the screen you have a nice overview of all the commits/diff. Here you can see the commits and messages, but also al the edited code in the "diff" tab. 

[Johannes Kilian]

Not quite sure if the folowing can give you the searched info - it has even to be done on command line ...

• Check out the desired branch
• Do a git log --first-parent This should give you all commits on the given branch only. see for example: http://marcgg.com/blog/2015/08/04/git-first-parent-log/). This is probably the same what you get using "Current-Branch" view in SourceTree (which Seth described above)
• Now you have to anlayse the commits to identify the affected files:
  git diff-tree --no-commit-id --name-only -r <COMMIT_ID> (see:http://stackoverflow.com/questions/424071/how-to-list-all-the-files-in-a-commit)

[Benjamin Fernandez]

That's awesome, I don't like use command line, It would be useful if sourceTree show us more options like this.

[Johannes Kilian]

git has way to many commands and options to be exposed in a  GUI in a meaningful and clear way.

Those things are mostly for expert level and not for the "normal" user - for whom the most git-GUIS are designed for

[Mohammed Asif, Nabil]

@Benjamin Fernandez You can! Using the tag:

?until=refs/heads/<branch-name>

My example:

curl -u <user>:<pass> -X GET "https://stash.xxx.com/rest/api/latest/projects/<project-key>/repos/<repo-slug>/commits?until=refs/heads/feature/ALMENGI-460"

[Ajay Kumar]

Thanks

[Raghu Ram Bodapati]

In the bit bucket you have an option called " Commits " there you can just check for the commit you are looking for. But make sure you select the branch you are looking for.