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gitgit-branch

Find out a Git branch creator

I want to find out who created a branch.

I am sort of able to do so with:

git branch -a | xargs -L 1 bash -c 'echo "$1 `git log --pretty=format:"%H %an" $1^..$1`"' _

However, this returns the last committer per branch, not necessarily the person who created the branch.

Solution

  • A branch is nothing but a commit pointer. As such, it doesn't track metadata like "who created me." See for yourself. Try cat .git/refs/heads/<branch> in your repository.

    That written, if you're really into tracking this information in your repository, check out branch descriptions. They allow you to attach arbitrary metadata to branches, locally at least.

    Also DarVar's answer below is a very clever way to get at this information.