I have been using Git for all my career in the tech. I am habitual of the basic commands such as git add, commit, status, log and a few more that I use consistently. Yes, until last week, I had never once used or heard about git shortlog.
Sometimes you want to know who actually did the stuff inside a repository. Or like me, at the end of each year at work, I have to compile a list of external contributors along with their contributions count.
To make this happen, you don’t need a fine-grained commit-by-commit archaeology, but look at the big picture. You can pipe log through grepand create a slightly complex pipeline. Or you could just use the tool that already exists on your system for exactly the purpose described previously:
git shortlogThe above command groups commits by author and lists of their commit messages. Readable? yes. Was I done? No.
The command also have some useful flags that you can use. One of them is -s, which gives you a summary mode. It counts the amount of commits without any commit message.
Then there’s -n, which sorts the number of commits in a descending order. When both of these flags are used along with git shortlog, the output displayed to you looks like below:
123 ABC
23 EFG
3 IJKInstantly you can see the view that your stakeholder might have demanded. This goes beyond compiling a list and giving a shoutout to the contributors. When used in a new codebase, you can leverage this to understand it by talking to the top contributors who might know more about the project repository. Probably the person with over a thousand commits.
You can scope it to a time range or between tags:
git shortlog -sn --since="2025-01-01"The above command is particularly nice for generating contributor lists for release notes or end-of-year lists. No more manual scrolling through a git log that is long and will take plenty of your time.
I think the reason I never discovered this command before is that I always reach out for git log first and then on a suggestion from a a colleague, started using grep when I needed to fulfill the release notes. However, Git has many commands like these under its umbrella, which might come handy in some situations.
Anyway. git shortlog -sn. Burn it into your brain.