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Manual: git-commit

GIT-COMMIT(1) Git Manual GIT-COMMIT(1)

NAME
git-commit - Record changes to the repository

DESCRIPTION
Create a new commit containing the current contents of the index and the given log message describing
the changes. The new commit is a direct child of HEAD, usually the tip of the current branch, and the
branch is updated to point to it (unless no branch is associated with the working tree, in which case
HEAD is "detached" as described in git-checkout(1)).

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

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

2. by using git-rm(1) 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 (without --interactive or --patch switch), 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 in addition to contents in the index, 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
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 choose which changes to commit. See git-add(1)
for details.

-U, --unified=
Generate diffs with lines of context. Defaults to diff.context or 3 if the config option is
unset.

--inter-hunk-context=
Show the context between diff hunks, up to the specified of lines, thereby fusing hunks
that are close to each other. Defaults to diff.interHunkContext or 0 if the config option is
unset.

-C , --reuse-message=
Take an existing object, and reuse the log message and the authorship information
(including the timestamp) when creating the commit.

-c , --reedit-message=
Like -C, but with -c the editor is invoked, so that the user can further edit the commit message.

--fixup=[(amend|reword):]
Create a new commit which "fixes up" when applied with git rebase --autosquash. Plain
--fixup= creates a "fixup!" commit which changes the content of but leaves its
log message untouched. --fixup=amend: is similar but creates an "amend!" commit which
also replaces the log message of with the log message of the "amend!" commit.
--fixup=reword: creates an "amend!" commit which replaces the log message of
with its own log message but makes no changes to the content of .

The commit created by plain --fixup= has a title composed of "fixup!" followed by the
title of , and is recognized specially by git rebase --autosquash. The -m option may be
used to supplement the log message of the created commit, but the additional commentary will be
thrown away once the "fixup!" commit is squashed into by git rebase --autosquash.

The commit created by --fixup=amend: is similar but its title is instead prefixed with
"amend!". The log message of is copied into the log message of the "amend!" commit and
opened in an editor so it can be refined. When git rebase --autosquash squashes the "amend!"
commit into , the log message of is replaced by the refined log message from the
"amend!" commit. It is an error for the "amend!" commit’s log message to be empty unless
--allow-empty-message is specified.

--fixup=reword: is shorthand for --fixup=amend: --only. It creates an "amend!"
commit with only a log message (ignoring any changes staged in the index). When squashed by git
rebase --autosquash, it replaces the log message of without making any other changes.

Neither "fixup!" nor "amend!" commits change authorship of when applied by git rebase
--autosquash. See git-rebase(1) for details.

--squash=
Construct a commit message for use with git rebase --autosquash. The commit message title 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 conflicting cherry-pick, declare
that the authorship of the resulting commit now belongs to 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. See git-status(1) for details.

--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 the long-format. This is the default output of git-
status(1). Implies --dry-run.

-z, --null
When showing short or porcelain git-status(1) output, print the filename verbatim and terminate
the entries with NUL, instead of LF. If no format is given, implies the --porcelain output
format. Without the -z option, filenames with "unusual" characters are quoted as explained for
the configuration variable core.quotePath (see git-config(1)).

-F , --file=
Take the commit message from . Use - to read the message from the standard input.

--author=
Override the commit author. Specify an explicit author using the standard A U Thor
format. Otherwise is assumed to be a pattern and is used to search
for an existing commit by that author (i.e. git rev-list --all -i --author=); the commit
author is then copied from the first such commit found.

--date=
Override the author date used in the commit.

-m , --message=
Use as the commit message. If multiple -m options are given, their values are concatenated
as separate paragraphs.

The -m option is mutually exclusive with -c, -C, and -F.

-t , --template=
When editing the commit message, start the editor with the contents in . 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, --no-signoff
Add a Signed-off-by trailer by the committer at the end of the commit log message. The meaning of
a signoff depends on the project to which you’re committing. For example, it may certify that the
committer has the rights to submit the work under the project’s license or agrees to some
contributor representation, such as a Developer Certificate of Origin. (See
https://developercertificate.org for the one used by the Linux kernel and Git projects.) Consult
the documentation or leadership of the project to which you’re contributing to understand how the
signoffs are used in that project.

The --no-signoff option can be used to countermand an earlier --signoff option on the command
line.

Git does not (and will not) have a configuration variable to enable the --signoff command line
option by default; see the commit.signoff entry in gitfaq(7) for more details.

--trailer [(=|:)]
Specify a (, ) pair that should be applied as a trailer. (e.g. git commit
--trailer "Signed-off-by:C O Mitter \ " --trailer "Helped-by:C O Mitter \
" will add the Signed-off-by trailer and the Helped-by trailer to the
commit message.) The trailer.* configuration variables (git-interpret-trailers(1)) can be used
to define if a duplicated trailer is omitted, where in the run of trailers each trailer would
appear, and other details.

-n, --verify, --no-verify
Bypass 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
Create a commit with an empty commit message without using plumbing commands like git-commit-
tree(1). Like --allow-empty, this command is primarily for use by foreign SCM interface scripts.

--cleanup=
Determine how the supplied commit message should be cleaned up before committing. The can
be strip, whitespace, verbatim, scissors or default.

strip
Strip leading and trailing empty lines, trailing whitespace, 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 found below is
truncated, if the message is to be edited. "#" can be customized with core.commentChar.

# ------------------------ >8 ------------------------

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
Let the user further edit the message taken from with -F , command line with -m
, and from with -C .

--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 by taking the updated working tree contents of the paths specified on the command
line, disregarding any contents that have been staged for other paths. 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. If used together with --allow-empty paths are also not required, and an
empty commit will be created.

--pathspec-from-file=
Pass pathspec in instead of commandline args. If is exactly - then standard input
is used. Pathspec elements are separated by LF or CR/LF. Pathspec elements can be quoted as
explained for the configuration variable core.quotePath (see git-config(1)). See also
--pathspec-file-nul and global --literal-pathspecs.

--pathspec-file-nul
Only meaningful with --pathspec-from-file. Pathspec elements are separated with NUL character and
all other characters are taken literally (including newlines and quotes).

-u[], --untracked-files[=]
Show untracked files.

The 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:

no
Show no untracked files

normal
Shows untracked files and directories

all
Also shows individual files in untracked directories.

All usual spellings for Boolean value true are taken as normal and false as no. 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 to help the user describe the commit by reminding what changes the commit has.
Note that this diff output doesn’t have its lines prefixed with #. This diff will not be a part
of the commit message. See the commit.verbose configuration variable in git-config(1).

If specified twice, show in addition the unified diff between what would be committed and the
worktree files, i.e. the unstaged changes to tracked files.

-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[], --gpg-sign[=], --no-gpg-sign
GPG-sign commits. The is optional and defaults to the committer identity; if specified,
it must be stuck to the option without a space. --no-gpg-sign is useful to countermand both
commit.gpgSign configuration variable, and earlier --gpg-sign.

--
Do not interpret any more arguments as options.

...
When is given on the command line, commit the contents of the files that match the
pathspec without recording the changes already added to the index. The contents of these files
are also staged for the next commit on top of what have been staged before.

For more details, see the pathspec entry in gitglossary(7).

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 restore --staged , 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).

COMMIT INFORMATION
Author and committer information is taken from the following environment variables, if set:

• GIT_AUTHOR_NAME

• GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL

• GIT_AUTHOR_DATE

• GIT_COMMITTER_NAME

• GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL

• GIT_COMMITTER_DATE

(nb "<", ">" and "\n"s are stripped)

The author and committer names are by convention some form of a personal name (that is, the name by
which other humans refer to you), although Git does not enforce or require any particular form.
Arbitrary Unicode may be used, subject to the constraints listed above. This name has no effect on
authentication; for that, see the credential.username variable in git-config(1).

In case (some of) these environment variables are not set, the information is taken from the
configuration items user.name and user.email, or, if not present, the environment variable EMAIL, or,
if that is not set, system user name and the hostname used for outgoing mail (taken from
/etc/mailname and falling back to the fully qualified hostname when that file does not exist).

The author.name and committer.name and their corresponding email options override user.name and
user.email if set and are overridden themselves by the environment variables.

The typical usage is to set just the user.name and user.email variables; the other options are
provided for more complex use cases.

DATE FORMATS
The GIT_AUTHOR_DATE and GIT_COMMITTER_DATE environment variables support the following date formats:

Git internal format
It is , where is the number of seconds since
the UNIX epoch. is a positive or negative offset from UTC. For example CET
(which is 1 hour ahead of UTC) is +0100.

RFC 2822
The standard date 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. Fractional parts of a second will be ignored,
for example 2005-04-07T22:13:13.019 will be treated as 2005-04-07T22:13:13.

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

In addition to recognizing all date formats above, the --date option will also try to make sense of
other, more human-centric date formats, such as relative dates like "yesterday" or "last Friday at
noon".

DISCUSSION
Though not required, it’s a good idea to begin the commit message with a single short (no more than
50 characters) 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.

Git is to some extent character encoding agnostic.

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

• Path names are encoded in UTF-8 normalization form C. This applies to tree objects, the index
file, ref names, as well as path names in command line arguments, environment variables and
config files (.git/config (see git-config(1)), gitignore(5), gitattributes(5) and gitmodules(5)).

Note that Git at the core level treats path names simply as sequences of non-NUL bytes, there are
no path name encoding conversions (except on Mac and Windows). Therefore, using non-ASCII path
names will mostly work even on platforms and file systems that use legacy extended ASCII
encodings. However, repositories created on such systems will not work properly on UTF-8-based
systems (e.g. Linux, Mac, Windows) and vice versa. Additionally, many Git-based tools simply
assume path names to be UTF-8 and will fail to display other encodings correctly.

• Commit log messages are typically encoded in UTF-8, but other extended ASCII encodings are also
supported. This includes ISO-8859-x, CP125x and many others, but not UTF-16/32, EBCDIC and CJK
multi-byte encodings (GBK, Shift-JIS, Big5, EUC-x, CP9xx etc.).

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 issue 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 their
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.

Everything above this line in this section isn’t included from the git-config(1) documentation. The
content that follows is the same as what’s found there:

commit.cleanup
This setting overrides the default of the --cleanup option in git commit. Changing the default
can be useful when you always want to keep lines that begin with the comment character
(core.commentChar, default #) in your log message, in which case you would do git config
commit.cleanup whitespace (note that you will have to remove the help lines that begin with the
comment character in the commit log template yourself, if you do this).

commit.gpgSign
A boolean to specify whether all commits should be GPG signed. Use of this option when doing
operations such as rebase can result in a large number of commits being signed. It may be
convenient to use an agent to avoid typing your GPG passphrase several times.

commit.status
A boolean to enable/disable inclusion of status information in the commit message template when
using an editor to prepare the commit message. Defaults to true.

commit.template
Specify the pathname of a file to use as the template for new commit messages.

commit.verbose
A boolean or int to specify the level of verbosity with git commit.

HOOKS
This command can run commit-msg, prepare-commit-msg, pre-commit, post-commit and post-rewrite 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 2.53.0 03/02/2026 GIT-COMMIT(1)

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