Get the Git Commit ID via Command Line

By  on  

I know just enough git to be dangerous.  I'm not doing advanced bisecting but I can stash, rebase, and reset with the best of them.  One new trick I learned from my boss, Luke Crouch, saves me loads of time:  getting the commit ID via command line.  For years I would merge a PR, go the project's main page, and copy the commit ID so that I could push code to staging and production.  Always seemed like an extra step rather than just making it happen from the terminal.  Here's the magical command:

git rev-parse HEAD

Of course you need to update your local repo to remote master, but you do that anyway, right?  Hopefully this will become a timesaver the same way it has for me!

Recent Features

  • By
    An Interview with Eric Meyer

    Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it? At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...

  • By
    Responsive and Infinitely Scalable JS Animations

    Back in late 2012 it was not easy to find open source projects using requestAnimationFrame() - this is the hook that allows Javascript code to synchronize with a web browser's native paint loop. Animations using this method can run at 60 fps and deliver fantastic...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Web Notifications API

    Every UI framework has the same set of widgets which have become almost essential to modern sites: modals, tooltips, button varieties, and notifications.  One problem I find is each site having their own widget colors, styles, and more -- users don't get a consistent experience.  Apparently the...

  • By
    CSS Custom Cursors

    Remember the Web 1.0 days where you had to customize your site in every way possible?  You abused the scrollbars in Internet Explorer, of course, but the most popular external service I can remember was CometCursor.  CometCursor let you create and use loads of custom cursors for...

Discussion

  1. On Mac, you should try this, it will copy the commit ID to your clipboard:

    git rev-parse HEAD | pbcopy
  2. Also you can use short version of git hash:

    git rev-parse --short HEAD
    
  3. Daniel Mejia

    I miss working a Mac, but Windows is working out just great too.

    git rev-parse HEAD | clip
  4. Christian Knappke

    To shorten things further, you can use @ as an abbreviation of HEAD.

  5. Adam Stankiewicz

    Here’s npm package if you need it in JS: https://github.com/sheerun/git-commit-id

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!