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 | --fixup | --squash) <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] [-S[<key-id>]] [--] [<file>...]


DESCRIPTION
       Stores the current contents of the index in a new commit along with a
       log message from the user describing the changes.

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

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

        2. by using git rm 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, 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, 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 chose 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=<commit>
           Construct a commit message for use with rebase --autosquash. The
           commit message will be the subject line from the specified commit
           with a prefix of "fixup! ". 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 a
           conflicting cherry-pick, declare that the authorship of the
           resulting commit now belongs of 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 a the long-format. Implies
           --dry-run.

       -z, --null
           When showing short or porcelain status output, terminate entries in
           the status output with NUL, instead of LF. If no format is given,
           implies the --porcelain output format.

       -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.

       -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
           Add Signed-off-by line by the committer at the end of the commit
           log message.

       -n, --no-verify
           This option bypasses 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
           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,
               and #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 "# ------------------------ >8
               ------------------------" is truncated if the message is to be
               edited. "#" can be customized with core.commentChar.

           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 only from the paths specified on the command line,
           disregarding any contents that have been staged so far. 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.

       -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.

               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. Note that
           this diff output doesn't have its lines prefixed with #.

       -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>]
           GPG-sign commit.

       --no-gpg-sign
           Countermand commit.gpgsign configuration variable that is set to
           force each and every commit to be signed.

       --
           Do not interpret any more arguments as options.

       <file>...
           When files are given on the command line, the command commits the
           contents of the named files, without recording the changes already
           staged. The contents of these files are also staged for the next
           commit on top of what have been staged before.

DATE FORMATS
       The GIT_AUTHOR_DATE, GIT_COMMITTER_DATE environment variables and the
       --date option 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 2 hours ahead UTC) is +0200.

       RFC 2822
           The standard email 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.

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

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 reset
       HEAD -- <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).

DISCUSSION
       Though not required, it's a good idea to begin the commit message with
       a single short (less than 50 character) 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.

       At the core level, Git is character encoding agnostic.

       o   The pathnames recorded in the index and in the tree objects are
           treated as uninterpreted sequences of non-NUL bytes. What
           readdir(2) returns are what are recorded and compared with the data
           Git keeps track of, which in turn are expected to be what lstat(2)
           and creat(2) accepts. There is no such thing as pathname encoding
           translation.

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

       o   The commit log messages are uninterpreted sequences of non-NUL
           bytes.

       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 issues 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 its 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.

HOOKS
       This command can run commit-msg, prepare-commit-msg, pre-commit, and
       post-commit 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 2.1.4                         03/19/2016                     GIT-COMMIT(1)
