Export list of all commit details in VSTS / Azure DevOps into file?

Question

I want to export a list of all commits in a repository (date-time, author, comment) into a file (of any format: CSV, XML, JSON, XLS etc.) which I will then analyse in a spreadsheet.

I want to compute stats such as:

• number of commits per author per month
• size of each commit (number of lines & files changed, size in kB)
• busiest times of day, busiest days of week, busiest months of year etc.

This is for a high-level management report so non-technical managers can understand the size of effort without blinding them with actual code & architecture details.

There seems to be no obvious way to do this. I find a few complicated ideas in Git command line documentation but none that yields this info. Admittedly I am not an expert in Git.

Does anyone know a simple easy way to get high-level per-commit info out of VSTS / Azure DevOps or Git command line?

Intuitively this should be really easy but so far I have to copy/paste each screenful of commits into a spreadsheet and build up the info in steps. Crazily manual process. But it's all viewable in the Azure Devops browser interface under Commits so why can't I export it all at once?

Surely I am not the only person on earth who wants to analyse commit activity in this way! But so far I can find nothing online.

Answer 1

Thanks to @Philippe for guiding to the answer:

• launch MS-DOS command line in the .git subdirectory for the solution
• issue command: git log --pretty=format:%h,%an,%aD,%s > ./GitLog.csv
• wait for GitLog.csv file to appear and open in spreadsheet program

Format option meanings:

• %h = commit hash
• %an = Author Name
• %aD = commit date
• %s = subject (comment of commit)

See here for more: https://git-scm.com/docs/pretty-formats and https://devhints.io/git-log-format

This solution doesn't give number of files or size of each commit, but it's a strong start.

(Philippe if you can move your comment in a proper answer rather, I'll give you the credit for providing the answer)