How do I export a git log to a text file?

Question

I want to export the log of all commits in a repo to a text file, is there any way to do this?

Answer 1

Its been long since this question was asked and by that time things have been evolved.

But, it is very interesting that all answers here are correct but not really addressing a post command error which is also very common. Lets try to understand . . . .

Who knew it was super easy. Run a simple command

git log -p --all > git_log.txt

but then I strucked on an error

> warning: inexact rename detection was skipped due to too many files.
> warning: you may want to set your diff.renameLimit variable to at least 2951 and retry the command.

and we had a problem. The output file was half a gig.

We just wanted the first half of 2018 which we are able to do with --after and --until

git log --pretty=format:"%ad - %an: %s" --after="2018-01-01" --until="2018-06-30" > git_log.txt

This worked nicely for our purposes and was nice to know that we could change the format if need be.