Git is a powerful version control system that provides numerous commands and options to control and manipulate the version history of your code. Among those commands, git diff and git log are frequently used.
git diff is used to show changes between commits, commit and working tree, etc., while git log is used to show commit history.
To see differences between specific commits, you would need to use these two commands in conjunction. First, use git log to identify the specific commits between which you want to see the differences. The basic command for viewing the git log is:
git logThis will give you a list of commits for that repository. Each commit will be represented with a commit hash, author, date, and commit message.
The commit hash is a long string of alphanumeric characters. This hash is a unique identifier for each commit. For the sake of simplicity, we will be needing the first 7 characters of this hash to identify a commit.
Let’s say that we have identified two commits:
commit1represented by the hashabcd123commit2represented by the hashefgh456
To see the differences between these two commits, you can use git diff as follows:
git diff abcd123 efgh456This command will provide a detailed line-by-line breakdown of what has changed between the two commit states.
If you’re only interested in seeing which files changed (not the specific changes within those files), you can add the --stat flag as follows:
git diff --stat abcd123 efgh456The --stat option will print out statistics regarding the diff, showing you how many insertions and deletions occurred, and in which files those changes happened.
Additionally, if you want to see a summary of the commit differences including new and deleted files, you can use the --summary option:
git diff --summary abcd123 efgh456Remember, you can also compare a specific commit to your current working directory by omitting one hash:
git diff abcd123This will show the difference between the commit abcd123 and your current uncommitted work.
Lastly, if you want to check the difference between the last commit and the current state, you can use HEAD keyword:
git diff HEADIn summary, git diff and git log can be used in conjunction to explore the history of a codebase and the changes that have happened over time.
