Find a commit on GitHub given the commit hash

Question

I am fairly new to Github and have come across an amateur-ish problem.

I have been asked to do a code review and have been provided with a commit hash, however I have tried looking in Git if I can search using commit hashes but couldn't find anything.

Is there a way I can find the changed code just by using the commit hash?

I find it utterly bizarre that github doesn't recognise hashes in searches and show you the commit if there's one matching that hash. — Craig Ringer
Actually @CraigRinger, github search will match hashes if they occur in a pull request. Indeed, you can search the whole of github for a seven-character hash prefix if you like. But it must be a pull request, not just any commit. — Todd Owen
@ToddOwen Which is nice, but not the point. It should match commit hashes within a repo when you search within that repo, it's truly wacky that it does not. — Craig Ringer

Matt McHenry Matt McHenry · Accepted Answer · 2012-08-31T11:52:17

A URL of the form https://github.com/<owner>/<project>/commit/<hash> will show you the changes introduced in that commit. For example here's a recent bugfix I made to one of my projects on GitHub:

https://github.com/jerith666/git-graph/commit/35e32b6a00dec02ae7d7c45c6b7106779a124685

You can also shorten the hash to any unique prefix, like so:

https://github.com/jerith666/git-graph/commit/35e32b

I know you just asked about GitHub, but for completeness: If you have the repository checked out, from the command line, you can achieve basically the same thing with either of these commands (unique prefixes work here too):

git show 35e32b6a00dec02ae7d7c45c6b7106779a124685
git log -p -1 35e32b6a00dec02ae7d7c45c6b7106779a124685

Note: If you shorten the commit hash too far, the command line gives you a helpful disambiguation message, but GitHub will just return a 404.

Find a commit on GitHub given the commit hash

3 Answers