Getting remote git commit log without local copy

Solution 1:

is this possible?

In short: no, not exactly. However, https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1178389/browse-and-display-files-in-a-git-repo-without-cloning has a nice alternative to running an SSH command remotely on the machine where the git repository lives.

It won't work with any git repo, just those where you are able to execute SSH commands against.

Solution 2:

It doesn't seem so (at least easily right now -- maybe I could extend Git to make this possible).

I wrote a small script which makes a shallow clone into a temporary project, then runs git log and then removes the directory again. THe shallow cloning should hopefully be fast.

The script is here: https://github.com/albertz/helpers/blob/master/git-log-remote.sh