如何在不克隆整个存储库的情况下显示远程git存储库的master分支的修订日期？

Question

I need to know the date and time of the latest revision of the master branch on a remote repository. I've got git installed locally, and I know the HTTPS clone URL for the git repo, which is hosted on GitHub. I know that if I had the repo cloned, I could do git show --format="%ci %cr" master | head -n 1 git show --format="%ci %cr" master | head -n 1 , but I need a command that will run quickly, and not leave any sizeable data behind; Cloning a 200 MB repo won't work.

How can I show the revision date of a remote GitHub repository's master branch, without cloning the whole repository?

Answer 1

I don't think you can do this strictly with Git (ie in a way that would work with all Git remotes). But there is a solution using GitHub's GET /repos/:owner/:repo/branches/:branch endpoint , eg

curl https://api.github.com/repos/github/git-lfs/branches/master
# {
#   "name": "master",
#   "commit": {
#     "sha": "df4be34fff5d9c70f5d8b897bbe23fa809776b6a",
#     "commit": {
#       "author": {
#         "name": "risk danger olson",
#         "email": "technoweenie@gmail.com",
#         "date": "2015-08-04T21:24:00Z"
#       },
#       "committer": {
#         "name": "risk danger olson",
#         "email": "technoweenie@gmail.com",
#         "date": "2015-08-04T21:24:00Z"
#       },
#       ...

Use your favourite JSON library to extract the commit/commit/author/date and / or commit/commit/committer/date nodes from the response. The command-line tool jq might be helpful:

curl https://api.github.com/repos/github/git-lfs/branches/master \
    | jq .commit.commit.author.date,.commit.commit.committer.date
# "2015-08-04T21:24:00Z"
# "2015-08-04T21:24:00Z"

For private repositories you'll have to authenticate .