Commit history on remote repository

Solution 1:

git log remotename/branchname

Will display the log of a given remote branch in that repository, but only the logs that you have "fetched" from their repository to your personal "copy" of the remote repository.

Remember that your clone of the repository will update its state of any remote branches only by doing git fetch. You can't connect directly to the server to check the log there, what you do is download the state of the server with git fetch and then locally see the log of the remote branches.

Perhaps another useful command could be:

git log HEAD..remote/branch

which will show you the commits that are in the remote branch, but not in your current branch (HEAD).

Solution 2:

NB. "origin" below use to represent the upstream of a cloned repository, replace "origin" with a descriptive name for the remote repo. "remote reference" can use the same format used in clone command.

git remote add origin <remote reference>
git fetch
git log origin/master

Solution 3:

A fast way of doing this is to clone using the --bare keyword and then check the log:

git clone --bare git@giturl tmpdir
cd tmpdir
git log branch

Solution 4:

I'm not sure when filtering was added but it's a way to exclude the object blobs if you only want to fetch the history/ref-logs:

git clone --filter=blob:none --no-checkout --single-branch --branch master git://some.repo.git .
git log