Find all commits that changed a given directory from Java

Question

I write a Java program, and I use jgit. In this Java program, I want to list all commits of some git repository g that changed at least one file in a directory x .

I do not want to solve the problem "on command line", but within Java.

Answer 1

In the high-level API of JGit you can use Git.log() with "addPath" to get a simple list of related commits.

   logs = git.log()
            .addPath("pom.xml")
            .call();

See this snippet in the jgit-cookbook for a ready-to-run example.

In general the methods on the entry-class Git provide similar functionality to the regular git commands.

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For the low-level API which provides much more fine-grained control/results, you can use Git.diff() with "newTree" and "oldTree" and a "pathFilter". The trees are constructed via RevWalk and CanonicalTreeParser

There is a related snippet for this approach in the jgit-cookbook at ShowFileDiff.java