I’ve recently been doing quite a bit of work with git log due to working on getting our CI server up to scratch with git. One of git logs handy options is

--pretty

Which allows you to define how the log is presented to you. As well as having a number of pre defined formats which you can pass to —pretty, for example:

--pretty=oneline

Pretty also allows you to create your own format using:

--pretty=format:<format>

Below is a full list of all available placeholders:

• %H: commit hash
• %h: abbreviated commit hash
• %T: tree hash
• %t: abbreviated tree hash
• %P: parent hashes
• %H: commit hash
• %h: abbreviated commit hash
• %T: tree hash
• %t: abbreviated tree hash
• %P: parent hashes
• %p: abbreviated parent hashes
• %an: author name
• %aN: author name (respecting .mailmap, see git-shortlog(1) or git-blame(1))
• %ae: author email
• %aE: author email (respecting .mailmap, see git-shortlog(1) or git-blame(1))
• %ad: author date (format respects —date= option)
• %aD: author date, RFC2822 style
• %ar: author date, relative
• %at: author date, UNIX timestamp
• %ai: author date, ISO 8601 format
• %cn: committer name
• %cN: committer name (respecting .mailmap, see git-shortlog(1) or git-blame(1))
• %ce: committer email
• %cE: committer email (respecting .mailmap, see git-shortlog(1) or git-blame(1))
• %cd: committer date
• %cD: committer date, RFC2822 style
• %cr: committer date, relative
• %ct: committer date, UNIX timestamp
• %ci: committer date, ISO 8601 format
• %d: ref names, like the —decorate option of git-log(1)
• %e: encoding
• %s: subject
• %f: sanitized subject line, suitable for a filename
• %b: body
• %B: raw body (unwrapped subject and body)
• %N: commit notes
• %gD: reflog selector, e.g., refs/stash@{1}
• %gd: shortened reflog selector, e.g., stash@{1}
• %gs: reflog subject
• %Cred: switch color to red
• %Cgreen: switch color to green
• %Cblue: switch color to blue
• %Creset: reset color
• %C(…): color specification, as described in color.branch.* config option
• %m: left, right or boundary mark
• %n: newline
• %%: a raw %
•  %x00: print a byte from a hex code

This very handily allows you to format the log however you wish. So let’s say we want output a very simple log that shows the commit’s author, hash and email adress, we can do the following:

git log --pretty=format:'Hash:%H Author:%an Email:%ae' -n 1

The -n 1 option simply means we only want to see the lastest commit logged, the above command outputs our log as we wished:

Hash:9af8acadf6739947114120e4cbe8a4bedd883c30 Author:Alex Fish Email:alex@alexefish.com

Nice!