Searching Git Logs By Commit Message

Occasionally we’ll need to go deeper into git history looking for changes related to specific part of our application. For these cases we can use git log --grep, as it follows:

git log --grep -E -i 'ticket(s)'

This searched the commit logs for all commits with any form of “ticket” or “tickets” in the commit message. Breaking down the specific options, we have:

• --grep: Search the log for specified string or pattern
• -E: Use “extended regular expressions” when interpreting the search pattern
• -i: Search case insentively

But this is perhaps more than we want to remember and type, so again git config alias to the rescue:

$ git config --global alias.glog `log -E -i --grep`

With that in place, we can do the same as above just by typing the following:

$ git glog 'ticket(s)'

But what about if we want to search for changes related to a particular strings in our code base?, luckily for us git logsupports another flag: -S. For instance, we can run the following to search for any time we added or removed a call to with_active_tickets method:

$ git log -S with_active_tickets

Also in some cases, we may want to see the changes to a single file to understand that file’s unique history. And of course we can do that with:

$ git log --oneline -- Gemfile

So finally once we’ve found a commit of interested, we can use the git show command to display the commit info and a diff of the changes the commit introduced:

$ git show 770b1ab6