Exploring Git history: telling a story with git commits

[kieranjmartin]

A blog looking at how you can examine git history (locally and in an online code repository)

[RitaPecuch]

GitHub: The commit history can be viewed for a repository overall, or can be viewed for individual files when they are selected which is a feature that we find useful at my company. The commit history can also be filtered by user. The main issue that we have encountered for obtaining meaningful insights from commit history is when users do not add meaningful commit messages, which we find is common for new users. Additionally, we utilize GitHub Releases feature to provide easy access to major code versions (i.e. each time our code goes into production for a study).

Local (Bash commands):

git log: show commit history
git log --author="Author Name": show commit history by author
git show <commit_hash>: show changes made in a commit

The "git log" command also has other useful options that can be added as flags such as "grep" for a keyword search.