How to Get Current Commit in Git

Git is a popular and worldwide used version controlling software. It is easy to use and gives a smooth platform to developers to work accordingly to their projects within the large team.

In Git, commits are considered the fundamental framework parts of a Git project timeline. Commits are known as essential snapshots or milestones of a Git project.

Every commit in Git has its unique identity; the long string follows them, and this string is known as the Commit Hash. The commit hash is also known as a Git commit reference or SHA.

Each commit also has the comments of the developer or any team member to remember the high-level details or tasks achieved in that task for the future.

This blog post teaches the procedure to get the current commit hash using the Git commands below. Git Hashes are unique and are assigned to each of the commits done by the developers to remember the identity for future purposes.

Retrieve Current Commit Hash in Git

There are a couple of methods to get the current commit hash. We will see each of them one by one in the following region.

git log

To get the information regarding the latest commit, we will use the command git log -1, and along with it, we will also use the flag --format so that we can also get the commit hash of the latest commit. The command is shown below.

git log -1 --format=format:"%H"

The %H is used for commit hash which is generated for the identity of that commit when it was pushed from the local branch to the remote branch.

git rev-parse

Through the command git rev-parse, we can also find the latest commit hash. It’s Git’s useful subcommand that is not widely used every day by every team developer.

git rev-parse is additional plumbing command fundamentally valued for administration. It returns the commit hash of the recent commit.

git rev-parse HEAD

If we only want to retrieve the first 8-digit string of the commit hash, we will add the filter cut -c 1-8 with the command git rev-parse in the following manner:

git rev-parse HEAD | cut -c 1-8

Also, we can add the filter --short with the command git rev-parse to get the unique short SHA.

git rev-parse --short

Sometimes, we want to convert references (branches and tags) into the commit hash. For this purpose, we can use two of the below-mentioned command.

git show-ref

Or

git for-each-ref