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Git is one of those version control systems that keeps a record of the changes made by its developers. Through these records, we can track various earlier commits, which teammates made what changes at what time, understand the bugs that were made earlier and in which versions, and much more using this technology.

Git helps us keep track of commits over time, which helps us observe the progress and history of the work done in the past in the Git repository. This history in Git should be navigable; otherwise, there is no use in keeping the history.

To this end, Git has two functions: git reflog and git log to find the history. These commands will help us quickly browse the history we want to see.

In this article, we will discuss these features or commands of Git in detail below.

Use the git log command to track command history in Git

git logIt is a handy tool that helps us view the history of everything we have done in the repository. We can use git log in a variety of ways to make our history more specific and summarized.

It helps us to view past commits so that we can observe the actions of our teammates - who did what type of activity in which repository at what time. It helps us to view, list and filter the commit history using filters.

It enables us to view details of each git commit along with its hash, the message linked to it, and its metadata.

git logThe command displays the commit hash, reference ID, commit message, author, date, other commit metadata, and whether it belongs to any branch HEAD. This is all done by default, as shown below.

$ git log

We can use various subcommands to filter the output of the git log command so that we only see information that is relevant to our research.

Filter command history using git log command

When we need to search for any specific message from past commits, we will have to use the following command:

git log --grep="Cat"

The above command will find the word Cat from past commit history and display the result to the user along with all matching commits.

Track command history in Git using the git reflog command

Reference log is also known as reflog in Git. This command is used to track the updates made to the tip of a branch and other commits on the same branch of the repository.

It helps us manage the information recorded in the past. It helps us review commits that are not referenced by any branch or tag in Git.

If we want to go back to an old state of a branch, after rewriting history it is possible, because the reflog allows us to go back there at any time and set the current head to it.

We can say that any work we do in Git exists in the reflog . We can access it through the reflog.

Whenever we update the tip of a branch for any reason, the reflog will add this entry to it and update the reference according to it.

git reflogThe command outputs the HEAD reference to us by default, and is used as follows:

$ git reflog

git reflogThe commands are abbreviated forms of the commands listed below:

$ git reflog show HEAD

The above command will show us the Head reflog.

Use the git reflog command to display command history

The command mentioned below will show us the reflog of the local repository in our device.

git reflog --relative-date

The command above will show us the reflog with the desired date information (for example, 3 weeks ago).

The following command will be executed to get the complete reflog of all past references:

$ git reflog show --all