Getting the sha1 of a desired commit from a remote repository

Question

Using git reflog, a user can only access his local reflog information?

How can one see the sha1 of a desired commit from a remote repository?

Answer 1

Git reflog is a history of sha1s you had checked out. This is true for whatever repository you're in. If delete your repository and clone it again, you will have lost that history.

The second question doesn't make sense. I'm guessing that you want to git fetch and then browse what is on the remote that you didn't merge yet. You would do that with git log master..origin/master to see what the remote master has that you don't.

Answer 2

If you want the SHA1 of a particular branch, you could try

git ls-remote <URL> <branch name>

or, if the branch name pattern is ambiguous and you want more control, maybe something like:

git ls-remote <URL> | grep refs/heads/<branch name>

or something like that. It also works for tags, but it looks like not much else.

Answer 3

I know this is an old question, but I needed to branch from a particular commit and needed to know the SHA of that commit in order to do so. After finding out how to do it from a GUI(SourceTree) I also found out how to do it from the command line. Here are the steps.

Using the command line

1. Go to your repo directory
2. Type git log
3. The SHA for each commit displayed is in the commit: field.

Using SourceTree 1. Find the commit that you're looking for 2. Right click on it 3. Select "Copy SHA to Clipboard"