Skip to main content

Searching commits

You can search for commits on GitHub and narrow the results using these commit search qualifiers in any combination.

You can search for commits globally across all of GitHub, or search for commits within a particular repository or organization. For more information, see About searching on GitHub.

When you search for commits, only the default branch of a repository is searched.

Tip

  • This article contains links to example searches on the GitHub.com website, but you can use the same search filters in any GitHub platform. In the linked example searches, replace github.com with the hostname for your GitHub platform.
  • For a list of search syntaxes that you can add to any search qualifier to further improve your results, see Understanding the search syntax.
  • Use quotations around multi-word search terms. For example, if you want to search for issues with the label "In progress," you'd search for label:"in progress". Search is not case sensitive.

Search within commit messages

You can find commits that contain particular words in the message. For example, fix typo matches commits containing the words "fix" and "typo."

Search by author or committer

You can find commits by a particular user with the author or committer qualifiers.

QualifierExample
author:USERNAMEauthor:defunkt matches commits authored by @defunkt.
committer:USERNAMEcommitter:defunkt matches commits committed by @defunkt.

The author-name and committer-name qualifiers match commits by the name of the author or committer.

QualifierExample
author-name:NAMEauthor-name:wanstrath matches commits with "wanstrath" in the author name.
committer-name:NAMEcommitter-name:wanstrath matches commits with "wanstrath" in the committer name.

The author-email and committer-email qualifiers match commits by the author's or committer's full email address.

QualifierExample
author-email:EMAIL