Git commit with no commit message

Question

git generally requires a non-empty message because providing a meaningful commit message is part of good development practice and good repository stewardship. The first line of the commit message is used all over the place within git; for more, read "A Note About Git Commit Messages".

If you open Terminal.app, cd to your project directory, and git commit -am '', you will see that it fails because an empty commit message is not allowed. Newer versions of git have the
--allow-empty-message commandline argument, including the version of git included with the latest version of Xcode. This will let you use this command to make a commit with an empty message:

git commit -a --allow-empty-message -m ''

Prior to the --allow-empty-message flag, you had to use the commit-tree plumbing command. You can see an example of using this command in the "Raw Git" chapter of the Git book.

And if you add an alias for it then it's even better right?

git config --global alias.nccommit 'commit -a --allow-empty-message -m ""'

Now you just do an nccommit, nc because of no comment, and everything should be commited.

When working on an important code update, if you really need an intermediate checkpoint you might just do:

git commit -am'.'

or shorter:

git commit -am.

This adds a commit with the message .

Note: starting git1.8.3.2 (July 2013), the following command (mentioned above by Jeremy W Sherman) won't open an editor anymore:

git commit --allow-empty-message -m ''

See commit 25206778aac776fc6cc4887653fdae476c7a9b5a:

If an empty message is specified with the option -m of git commit then the editor is started.
That's unexpected and unnecessary.
Instead of using the length of the message string for checking if the user specified one, directly remember if the option -m was given.

---

git 2.9 (June 2016) improves the empty message behavior:

See commit 178e814 (06 Apr 2016) by Adam Dinwoodie (me-and).
See commit 27014cb (07 Apr 2016) by Jeff King (peff).
^{(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit 0709261, 22 Apr 2016)}

commit: do not ignore an empty message given by -m ''

• "git commit --amend -m '' --allow-empty-message", even though it looks strange, is a valid request to amend the commit to have no message at all.
  Due to the misdetection of the presence of -m on the command line, we ended up keeping the log messsage from the original commit.
• "git commit -m "$msg" -F file" should be rejected whether $msg is an empty string or not, but due to the same bug, was not rejected when $msg is empty.
• "git -c template=file -m "$msg"" should ignore the template even when $msg is empty, but it didn't and instead used the contents from the template file.

--allow-empty-message -m '' (and -m "") fail in Git 2.29.2 on PowerShell:

error: switch `m' requires a value

(oddly enough, with a backtick on one side and a single quote on the other)

---

The following works consistently in Linux, PowerShell, and Command Prompt:

git commit --allow-empty-message --no-edit

The --no-edit bit does the trick, as it prevents the editor from launching.

I find this form more explicit and a bit less hacky than forcing an empty message with -m ''.