How can I know which commit was used when installing a pip package from git?

Question

If I install a package from git using https://pip.pypa.io/en/stable/reference/pip_install/#git does the specific commit that was checked out logged somewhere?

Answer 1

You could use knittl's idea to find the nearest commit -- the only modification below is to address the fact that you are comparing the git tree to an installed package, not a git repository:

Since the installed package may lack some of the directory structure of the git repository, make a new directory for the git repo. I'll use html5lib for an example:

mkdir ~/tmp/html5lib
cd ~/tmp/html5lib/
git init

Now fetch the git tree:

git remote add foreign https://github.com/html5lib/html5lib-python
git fetch foreign

Copy the installed package into the git repo:

rsync -a ~/.virtualenvs/muffy/lib/python3.4/site-packages/html5lib ~/tmp/html5lib/

Run git diff to compare the current state of the repo (with the installed package's code) to each revision in the git tree:

for REV in $(git rev-list --all); do
    echo $(git diff --shortstat foreign/master $REV) $REV ;
done | sort -n

This sorts by the number of files changed, then the number of insertions, then deletions. The output will look something like this:

1 file changed, 3 insertions(+), 1 deletion(-) 17499b9763a090f7715af49555d21fe4b558958b
2 files changed, 10 insertions(+), 8 deletions(-) ec674a97243e76da43f06abfd0a891308f1ff801
3 files changed, 17 insertions(+), 12 deletions(-) 1a28d721091a2c433c6e8471d14cbb75afd70d1c
4 files changed, 18 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-) ff6111cd82191a2eb963d6d662c6da8fa2e7ddde
6 files changed, 19 insertions(+), 19 deletions(-) ea0fafdbff732b1272140b696d6948054ed1d6d2

The last item on each line is the associated git commit.

If the git history is very long you'll want to modify git rev-list --all to a range of commits. For example, use git rev-list tag1..tag2 to search between two tags. If you know approximately when the package was installed, you might have a good guess for what tags to use. Use git tag to show the names of the possible tags. See the docs for more options.