How do I find the date of the first commit in a GitHub repository?

Question

Given a GitHub repository, how can I quickly find the date of its first commit?

I often want to know how old the project is, but I cannot find a quick way to get to the start of the commit histories for projects with very long commit histories.

Answer 1

Click on the "Insights" tab of the repository that you want to see the oldest commit, followed by the "Network" sub-tab on the left menu bar. When the page is fully loaded (i.e. you can see lots of lines joining and all), press Shift+← to go all the way to the first commit. Click on the dot that represents the first commit and you can get it.

Note: This only works for repositories that was created on GitHub originally, not repositories that were imported from another place (i.e. commits not registered through GitHub itself). Also, this method may not necessarily work if the repository has too many forks.

Alternatively, you can clone the repository to your local machine and run the following command:

git log --reverse

The repository's commits will then be shown in reverse order (oldest commit first).

Answer 2

Hydra's answer may not work with projects that have a lot of forks: "Couldn't load network graph. Too many forks to display."

You can check the 'Contributors' tab under 'Insights'

Answer 3

If you have cloned the repo, just use git commands as usual:

// cd to repo
$ git log --reverse

it will show you the history of commits in reverse order

Answer 4

This will get you the last page:

<?php
$s_url = $argv[1] . '/commits?page=';
$n_hi = 1;

while (true) {
   $s_hi = sprintf('%s%d', $s_url, $n_hi);
   echo $s_hi, "\t";
   $s_get = file_get_contents($s_hi);
   if (strpos($s_get, 'No commits found') !== false) {
      echo "Not Found\n";
      break;
   }
   echo "OK\n";
   $n_lo = $n_hi;
   $n_hi *= 2;
}

while (true) {
   $n_mid = intdiv($n_lo + $n_hi, 2);
   if ($n_mid == $n_lo) {
      break;
   }
   $s_mid = sprintf('%s%d', $s_url, $n_mid);
   echo $s_mid, "\t";
   $s_get = file_get_contents($s_mid);
   if (strpos($s_get, 'No commits found') !== false) {
      echo "Not Found\n";
      $n_hi = $n_mid;
   } else {
      echo "OK\n";
      $n_lo = $n_mid;
   }
}

Example:

PS C:\> git.php https://github.com/jp9000/OBS
https://github.com/jp9000/OBS/commits?page=1    OK
https://github.com/jp9000/OBS/commits?page=2    OK
https://github.com/jp9000/OBS/commits?page=4    OK
https://github.com/jp9000/OBS/commits?page=8    OK
https://github.com/jp9000/OBS/commits?page=16   OK
https://github.com/jp9000/OBS/commits?page=32   OK
https://github.com/jp9000/OBS/commits?page=64   OK
https://github.com/jp9000/OBS/commits?page=128  Not Found
https://github.com/jp9000/OBS/commits?page=96   Not Found
https://github.com/jp9000/OBS/commits?page=80   Not Found
https://github.com/jp9000/OBS/commits?page=72   OK
https://github.com/jp9000/OBS/commits?page=76   OK
https://github.com/jp9000/OBS/commits?page=78   OK
https://github.com/jp9000/OBS/commits?page=79   OK

Answer 5

You can use unix sed tool for filtering just the date of the first commit using

git log --reverse | sed -n -e "3,3p" 

I think it is exactly you need.

Answer 6

As Git applies the --reverse after any filtering of commits, you need to output --all commits and use other commands to restrict the output. You can use the formatting options to get the output you like.

Get just the date of the first commit

Using the %as format to display the author date in short format.

$ git log --reverse --format="format:%as" --all | head -n 1
2017-10-10

Get the date in ISO 8601 format of the first commit

$ git log --reverse --format="format:%aI" --all | head -n 1
2017-10-10T18:27:11+02:00

Get just the year of the first commit

By using %ad output format, the --date format is respected. And here we can use additional formatting %Y to select just the year.

$ git log --reverse --date="format:%Y" --format="format:%ad" | head -n 1
2017

Get more details of the first commit

Just select the 3 lines that summarize the commit details as git log does in the normal output.

$ git log --reverse --all | head -n 3
commit aa00aa00aa00aa00aa00aa00aa00aa00aa00aa00
Author: Name Surname <name.surn[email protected]>
Date:   Tue Oct 10 18:27:11 2017 +0200

Note that there is no need to reverse if you format and use other commands to filter the relevant commit. You could use tail instead of head for example. But a reversed list can be easier to work with if you need more details, like I show in my example to print the commit metadata.

Note that Git keeps track of both the 'author date' and the 'committer date'. The above commands use the author date %as but you can get the committer date by replacing the %a for %c like %cs. In the default 'medium' type git log output the 'author date' is shown.

Answer 7

Get commit list reversed from repo URL (copy only repo index to temp dir, then delete):

#!/bin/bash

TMP_DIR=$(mktemp -d -t git-first-commit-date-XXXXXXXXXX)

REPO_URL="$1"
MAIN_BRANCH="$2"

if [[ -z "$REPO_URL" ]]; then
  echo "Error: no repo URL provided"
  exit 1
fi

if [[ -z "$MAIN_BRANCH" ]]; then
  MAIN_BRANCH="main"
fi

cd ${TMP_DIR}

set -x

git clone --filter=blob:none --no-checkout --single-branch --branch "$MAIN_BRANCH" "${REPO_URL}" .

git log --reverse

chmod -R u+w ${TMP_DIR}/.git
rm -r ${TMP_DIR}

Answer 8

Using GitHub's GraphQL API which is accessible here, we can do it with two different queries and a tiny bit of experimentation and searching.

In the first query, we get the creation date of the repo (which is usually handy in terms of knowing how old a repo is),

query { 
  repository(name: "go-ethereum", owner: "ethereum") {
    createdAt
  }
}

The reply (on the right hand side if using the Explorer) might be

{
  "data": {
    "repository": {
      "createdAt": "2013-12-26T13:05:46Z"
    }
  }
}

We have a candidate date. Next, we query the history of commits on main branch, and we can follow several strategies but I have found that viewing the history until the day after creation works well

query { 
  repository(name: "go-ethereum", owner: "ethereum") {
    createdAt
    defaultBranchRef {
        target{
        ... on Commit{
            history(until: "2013-12-27T00:00:00") {
            nodes {
              abbreviatedOid
              authoredDate
              committedDate
              message
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

The last commit included in the response reads

...
{
  "abbreviatedOid": "5db3335",
  "authoredDate": "2013-12-26T11:45:52Z",
  "committedDate": "2013-12-26T11:45:52Z",
  "message": "Initial commit"
}

We've found the date of the initial commit!

Answer 9

There is a way to do it from the GitHub interface itself.

Go the the project page and pick the Code tab followed by the Commits sub-tab as shown here:

That brings you to your list of commits. If you then scroll to the bottom of the page, you can keep going back in time by clicking the Older button.

I couldn't really find a way to sort it so that the commits shown in ascending order.

Answer 10

git log --reverse --format="format:%ci" | sed -n 1p

If you want to get it from a command line

Answer 11

None of the solutions listed above worked for me. git log --reverse does not work if there are a lot of forks in your tree. The script mentioned by @steven-penny did not work because github changed their urls to use a hash for the after query param value when browsing commints /master?after=Y3Vyc29yOvqNPhkVDBdTgRaxBYnOx1jBe88LKzM0 and neither did any of the graphs for the repo.

So what did work for me was quite simple. gitk. Using gitk and scrolling down to the last commit gave me the information I was looking.

Hope this helps other folks looking for similar info.