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Viewing a commit's changes

The Commits tab of a repository lists every commit on a branch. Click a commit's short id or its message to open the commit detail page, which shows exactly what that commit changed.

What the page shows​

  • The commit's full id, author, and date, and its message as the heading.
  • A Changes section: every file the commit touched, file by file, with added lines in green and removed lines in red, plus per-file and total files changed / +additions / −deletions counts.

The diff is the change the commit introduced on its own — that is, the difference between the commit and its parent. For the very first commit in a repository (a root commit, which has no parent) every file shows as an addition, because there was nothing before it.

The diff is always computed live from git; nothing is stored in the database. Because that makes the page expensive to build, it is rate-limited per visitor — open a lot of them quickly and you may be asked to confirm you are a person, or told to slow down. See The "Quick check" page; logging in raises the allowance a lot.

Getting there​

  • From the repository sidebar, open Commits, then click any row.
  • Or go straight to …/commit/<id>, where <id> is the commit's full or abbreviated hash (e.g. …/commit/1a2b3c4).