Git commit with no commit message

git message commit
Nik picture Nik · Jun 2, 2011 · Viewed 113.1k times · Source

How can I commit changes without specifying commit message? Why is it required by default?

Answer

Jeremy W. Sherman picture Jeremy W. Sherman · Jun 2, 2011

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.

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