Is there a way to export the full commit history for all repositories in a CSV or TXT format?

[Kraig]

I have a project with nearly 200 active repositories. I have been tasked with pulling the full commit history for all repositories. The resulting file will be audited by an accounting team. At minimum the information they are requesting is repository name, commit date, commit message, and person responsible but have stated that more information is better.

[Mike Corsaro · Accepted solution]

Hello! You can do this by running the git log command with custom parameters. To run it for all your repos you'll have to write a script to go through each folder and run this command:

git log --branches --tags --remotes --full-history --date-order --format='%ai %an <%ae> %h %f'

Note the --format part: this allows you to specify a custom output format for the log:

--format='%ai %an <%ae> %h %f'
%ai: author date
%an: author name
%ae: author email
%h: commit hash (small)
%f: commit subject (sanitized)

You can find more format strings on the git log manual page.

[Adam Harris]

Is it possible to include the branch name in output?

[Mike Corsaro]

Yeah, you can use the %d as part of the format string (it will add refs when it encounters a commit that has one), but be aware that each commit will not have the branch it is part of marked with the name.

This is because git doesn't actually know which commit a branch belongs to. It's confusing, but think of branches as a chain of commits where the name of the branch is just a pointer to the latest commit in the chain. So in order to figure out which commit is in a branch you'll need to "walk" all commits from your starting commit until you reach the latest commit which is the branch pointer reference.

[Halil Sefa Gerdan]

Hi, can we add the project name in that output file?

[Scarlett Zhao]

How can we add Jira ticket number in git log？ Thanks!

[Poat]

@Scarlett Zhao the developers should be including this in the commit message - here's an output from the above command for a project which is linked to Jira

2022-10-19 11:29:18 -0400 Patrick Masters <pmasters@lazydays.com> 14c5a7a GRAPH-93-yml-and-config-tweaks
2022-10-19 11:00:45 -0400 Patrick Masters <pmasters@lazydays.com> 792d563 GRAPH-93-use-ControlReference-to-find-like-GL-items
2022-10-11 13:25:45 -0400 Patrick Masters <pmasters@lazydays.com> ae39371 GRAPH-88-added-versioning-and-editorconfig

[Irina Sanikovich [StiltSoft]]

You can read this article that describes how to export commit and pull request data to CSV.