git-authors

list all contributors to a repository

TLDR

Print the author list to standard output

$ git authors --list

Print the author list without email addresses

$ git authors --list --no-email

Append authors to the repository's AUTHORS file and open it in your editor

$ git authors

Append authors to a specific file

$ git authors [CONTRIBUTORS]

Save the list to a file yourself

$ git authors --list > [AUTHORS]

SYNOPSIS

git authors [--list] [--no-email] [file]

git authors collects the unique contributors to a repository from its commit history, sorted by number of commits in descending order. It is part of git-extras, a collection of git utilities not shipped with core git.The default behaviour is not to print. Run bare, git authors appends the list to an AUTHORS file and then opens that file in your git editor, which is the workflow the tool was built for: maintaining a credits file in a project. --list is the option you want when you just need the names on standard output or in a pipeline.Underneath it is a wrapper around git shortlog -sne, with awk passes that strip the commit counts and de-duplicate authors by name and by email.

PARAMETERS

-l, --list

Print the author list to standard output instead of writing it to a file.

--no-email

Omit email addresses, leaving only names.

file

File to append to. Ignored with --list. Defaults to an existing file matching **\*authors\* or \*contributors\* in the repository root, or AUTHORS** if none is found.

INSTALL

sudo apt install git

sudo dnf install git

sudo pacman -S git

sudo apk add git

sudo zypper install git

brew install git

nix profile install nixpkgs#git

CAVEATS

Bare git authors appends rather than overwrites, so running it twice duplicates every entry in the AUTHORS file. It also opens an editor, which makes it unsuitable for scripts and CI; use --list there.It picks its target file by globbing the repository root for anything matching **\*authors\* or \*contributors\***, case-insensitively, so it can append to an unexpected file in a repository with several such names.Authors come from each commit's author field, so contributors who used different names or addresses on different machines appear multiple times. De-duplication is by exact name and exact email; use a .mailmap file with git shortlog for real canonicalization.--no-email de-duplicates on email first and then drops the addresses, so two distinct people sharing a display name can collapse into one entry.

HISTORY

git authors is part of git-extras, created by TJ Holowaychuk in 2010 to bundle common git helper scripts. The project is now community-maintained.

RESOURCES

Source code · Documentation