I'd like to get the number of commits of my git repository, a bit like SVN revision numbers. The goal is to use it as a unique, incrementing build number.
I currently do like that, on Unix/Cygwin/msysGit:
git log --pretty=format:'' | wc -l
But I feel it's a bit of a hack.
Is there a better way to do that? It would be cool if I actually didn't need wc or even git, so it could work on a bare Windows. Just read a file or a directory structure ...
Generate a number during the build and write it to a file. Whenever you make a release, commit that file with the comment "Build 147" (or whatever the build number currently is). Don't commit the file during normal development. This way, you can easily map between build numbers and versions in Git.
If you’re looking for a unique and still quite readable identifier for commits, git describe might be just the thing for you.
There's a nice helper script that the Git folks use to help generate a useful version number based on Git describe. I show the script and explain it in my answer to How would you include the current commit id in a git project’s files? Hope that helps.
Tito might be more than you need, but here it goes. It's a tool for managing RPM based projects using git for their source code repository and it offers the following features:
Adding to Rayne's answer, to strip out the blank lines and usernames from the output, and get just the commit count, run it through grep:
git shortlog | grep -E '^[ ]+\w+' | wc
The lines that have commit messages begin with some spaces.