count-number-of-commits-on-a-branch.md

Count Number Of Commits On A Branch

The git rev-list command will show all commits that fit the given revision criteria. By adding in the --count flag, we get a count of the number of commits that would have been displayed. Knowing this, we can get the count of commits for the current branch like so:

$ git rev-list --count HEAD
4

This finds and counts commits from HEAD (usually the top of the current branch) all the back in reverse chronological order to the beginning of the branch (typically the beginning of the repository). This works exactly as expected for a the main branch.

What about when we are on a feature branch though?

Let's say we've branched off main and made a few commits. And now we want the count.

$ git rev-list --count HEAD
7

Unfortunately, that is counting up the commits on the feature branch but it keeps counting all the way back to the beginning of the repo.

If we want a count of just the commits on the current branch, then we can specify a range: from whatever main was when we branched to the HEAD of this branch.

$ git rev-list --count HEAD
3

This is the same as saying, I want all commits on HEAD, but exclude (^) the commits on main:

git rev-list --count HEAD ^main
3

See man git-rev-list for more details.