Getting the last commit hash from a remote repo without cloning

Question

I want to get the hash of last commit that has happened in a remote repo without cloning it. Is there a way to do this ? I found several methods but for all of them to work,

Answer 1

One way would be the following:

1) Initialize your local repo: git init

2) Add your the remote to it: git remote add myRemote "https://myremoterepo"

3) Fetch the repo and check the history for the last commit: git fetch remote

Alternatively, you could also go to the repo page on github (I assume from your tag) and check the commits tab. It will show you the latest commit and its sha.

Answer 2

$ git ls-remote https://github.com/gturri/dokuJClient.git 
2fb540fc8c7e9116791638393370a2fa0f079737    HEAD
2fb540fc8c7e9116791638393370a2fa0f079737    refs/heads/master

This command can be run from any directory.

If you only want the last sha1, eg to use it in a script, you could then do:

git ls-remote https://github.com/gturri/dokuJClient.git HEAD | awk '{ print $1}'