Get Total Commits Number in Git

In a few weeks there will be an anniversary as I've started working on current project. So I decided to find out the total number of made commits from the project begin. While it's obvious for Subversion, in Git you need something more that just look at the revision number.

First, I came out with a simple command that prints the total number of commits:

$ git log --pretty=format:'%h' | wc -l

prints out

2485

This is a bit primitive and that wouldn't be such a simple solution if need to find the total number of commits per author. I didn't want to believe there is not better way to get the total number of commits per author with standard Git tool.

After a few minutes of research I found there is a simple and powerful util git shortlog.

So next command

$ git shortlog -n -s

prints out

  2317  Ruslan Khmelyuk
   104  Author_1
    53  Author_2
     9  unknown
     2  Author_3

I've summed the commit numbers for each committer and found that the total commits number by git shortlog command is 2485 and that is equal to the result of git log | wc -l command. While git rev-list -all | wc -l command prints there are 2488 commits in the repository. Strange.

Short investigation helped me to understand that both commands working fine and show correct number. The difference between commands

$ git log --pretty=format:'%h' | wc -l
$ git shortlog -n -s

and

$ git rev-list --all | wc-l

is in the source they're using to calculate commits list.

git log and git shortlog use current branch commits log, while git rev-list uses all repository as source of commits list. I had 3 more commits in the other branch, so in my local repository I had in total 2488 commits.

Even more, If you need to calculate the total number of commits in the remote repository, you will need to use git rev-list command:

$ git fetch origin
$ git rev-list --remotes | wc -l

Thus I can say, that git rev-list command works best to find out the total number of made commits.