In my work at Futurice I have started a small tradition in my team that we call the Git Tip Of The Day. Each day I share a small feature of git that might not be known to everybody but that can help people in their daily work. I will start sharing some of these here on the blog as well. Of course, most of these have been featured in other blogs before but I find that it often helps to get another perspective on a topic.

So on this happy Tuesday I will talk about a feature that can come in quite handy in daily standups at the beginning of the week. A command that will help you answer the question “what did I work on last Friday again?”

git log --all --since='last Friday' --author='knut'

You probably know already that you can use git log to look at commits in a git repository. In the example above I am passing three flags that you might not have used before.

  • --all makes sure to consider all branches in the log. This is helpful if you can’t even remember on what branch you made your changes.
  • --since sets a start time from which on dates should be considered. Git uses a custom and very flexible date parser here that is internally known as approxidate . You can provide dates such as 2019-01-01 but also relative dates like 2 weeks ago, yesterday, etc. Unfortunately, the accepted formats seems not to be documented very well.
    --since also a sibling command called --until
  • -- author takes a pattern argument which it will match against the author of the commit message. This means that since I am the only Knut in my project I can simply filter by my name here. If there were multiple, I would probably provide my email address --author knut.huehne@futurice.com.

If you only want to get a quick overview and do not care about the commit message bodies you can also add a --oneline to the end of the command to get a condensed list.

If you cannot be bothered remembering all of this, there is also git-standup, a wrapper around git log which simplifies this whole process. I personally find git log to be good enough though especially since it does not require any extra installs.

Is there an option to git log I missed? Or another feature of git that you would like to learn more about? Let me know on twitter.