What's the difference between git reflog and log?

Question

The man page says that log shows the commit logs and reflog manages reflog information. What exactly is reflog information and what does it have that the log doesn\'t? The l

Answer 1

I like to think of the difference between git log and reflog as being the difference between a private record and a public record.

Private vs public

With the git reflog, it keeps track of everything you've done locally. Did you commit? Reflog tracks it. Did you do a hard reset? Reflog tracks it. Did you amend a commit? Reflog tracks it. Everything you've done locally, there's an entry for it in the reflog.

This isn't true for the log. If you amend a commit, the log only shows the new commit. If you do a reset and skip back a few commits in your history, those commits you skipped over won't show up in the log. When you push your changes to another developer or to GitHub or something like that, only the content tracked in the log will appear. To another developer, it will look like the resets never happened or the amends never happened.

The log is polished. The reflog is lapidary.

So yeah, I like the 'private vs public' analogy. Or maybe a better log vs reflog analogy is 'polished vs lapidary.' The reflog shows all your trials and errors. The log just shows a clean and polished version of your work history.

Take a look at this image to emphasize the point. A number of amends and resets have occurred since the repository was initialized. The reflog shows all of it. Yet the log command makes it look as though there has only ever been one commit against the repo:

Back to the 'safety net' idea

Also, since the reflog keeps track of things you amended and commits you reset, it allows you to go back and find those commits because it'll give you the commit ids. Assuming your repository hasn't been purged of old commits, that allows you to resurrect items no longer visible in the log. That's how the reflog sometimes ends up saving someone's skin when they need to get back something they thought they inadvertently lost.