I'm trying to use tags for release management in Git—I create a tag for each release. I'd like to be able to create release notes by listing the comment titles for every commit since a tag, or between 2 tags. I can't seem to find any way to do this.
5 Answers
If your tags are named LastRelease
and NextRelease
then do
git log --pretty=format:%s LastRelease..NextRelease
.

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Awesome tip; I could never figure out how to get `git log` to only show partial information. Thank you! – wizonesolutions Apr 10 '12 at 21:30
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31You can also use `git log --oneline` which prints the title and part of the hash. – Sijmen Mulder Jul 27 '12 at 11:19
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Additionally, if you want to list all of the commit titles from the start of a branch, you can use `previous_branch_name..HEAD` instead of `LastRelease..NextRelease`. – XtraSimplicity Jul 16 '18 at 21:21
To show commits since TAG to current head:
git log TAG..HEAD
Between two commits:
git log TAG..TAG
For formatting the log output have a look at Pretty formats section of git log.

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You should look into git shortlog
. Here's an example of the output:
$ git shortlog
Al Jones (512):
Added to .gitignore file
Updated user model
Bob Smith (222):
Minor tweak to view
Updated accounts controller
Charles West (321):
Started specs for user model
Finished specs for user model
For your case you would want to run git shortlog LastRelease..NextRelease

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I combined Dominic's and Igor's answers together to return the titles of all commits from 2b150c4 to the current HEAD in chronological order and prints it to Terminal (echo
added because git log
doesn't line break the last line).
git log --pretty=format:%s 2b150c4..HEAD --reverse | cat; echo

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In order to get detailed infos on commit with a certain (known) message, I firstly call git log --oneline
for overview of commints with messeges and then by the identified SHA view the commit with git show <SHA>
or git log --stat -p <SHA>

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