Count the number of commits on a Git branch

Question

To count the commits for the branch you are on:

git rev-list --count HEAD

for a branch

git rev-list --count <branch-name>

If you want to count the commits on a branch that are made since you created the branch

git rev-list --count HEAD ^<branch-name>

This will count all commits ever made that are not on the branch-name as well.

Examples

git checkout master
git checkout -b test
<We do 3 commits>
git rev-list --count HEAD ^master

Result: 3

If your branch comes of a branch called develop:

git checkout develop
git checkout -b test
<We do 3 commits>
git rev-list --count HEAD ^develop

Result: 3

Ignoring Merges

If you merge another branch into the current branch without fast forward and you do the above, the merge is also counted. This is because for git a merge is a commit.

If you don't want to count these commits add --no-merges:

git rev-list --no-merges --count HEAD ^develop

To see total no of commits you can do as Peter suggested above

git rev-list --count HEAD

And if you want to see number of commits made by each person try this line

git shortlog -s -n

will generate output like this

135  Tom Preston-Werner
15  Jack Danger Canty
10  Chris Van Pelt
7  Mark Reid
6  remi

It might require a relatively recent version of Git, but this works well for me:

git rev-list --count develop..HEAD

This gives me an exact count of commits in the current branch having its base on master.

The command in Peter's answer, git rev-list --count HEAD ^develop includes many more commits, 678 vs 97 on my current project.

My commit history is linear on this branch, so YMMV, but it gives me the exact answer I wanted, which is "How many commits have I added so far on this feature branch?".

How much commits was done to current branch since begin of history, not counting commits from merged branches:

git rev-list HEAD --count --first-parent

From documentation git rev-list --help:

--first-parent

Follow only the first parent commit upon seeing a merge commit. This option can give a better overview when viewing the evolution of a particular topic branch, because merges into a topic branch tend to be only about adjusting to updated upstream from time to time, and this option allows you to ignore the individual commits brought in to your history by such a merge. Cannot be combined with --bisect.

Note: Shallow clone will shrink the history size. E.g. if you clone with --depth 1, will return 1.

number of commits done since some other commit:

git rev-list HEAD abc0923f --count --first-parent

or the same:

git rev-list abc0923f.. --count --first-parent

or use any other git reference:

git rev-list master tag-v20 --count --first-parent

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Count commits done since 2018 year

git rev-list HEAD --count --first-parent --since=2018-01-01

01-01-2018, 01.01.2018, 2018.01.01 also works.

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git rev-label

I wrote a script to get version-revision from Git in format like '$refname-c$count-g$short$_dirty' which expands to master-c137-gabd32ef.
Help is included to script itself.

How about git log --pretty=oneline | wc -l

That should count all the commits from the perspective of your current branch.