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Git file blame (FREE ALL)

Git blame provides more information about every line in a file, including the last modified time, author, and commit hash.

View blame for a file

Prerequisites:

  • The file type must be text-based. The GitLab UI does not display git blame results for binary files.

To view the blame for a file:

  1. Go to your project's Code > Repository.
  2. Select the file you want to review.
  3. In the upper-right corner, select Blame.

When you select Blame, this information is displayed:

Git blame output

If you hover over a commit in the UI, the commit's precise date and time are shown.

Blame previous commit

Introduced in GitLab 12.7.

To see earlier revisions of a specific line, select View blame prior to this change until you've found the changes you're interested in viewing:

Blame previous commit

Associated git command

If you're running git from the command line, the equivalent command is git blame <filename>. For example, if you want to find blame information about a README.md file in the local directory, run the following command:

git blame README.md

The output looks similar to the following, which includes the commit time in UTC format:

62e2353a (Achilleas Pipinellis     2019-07-11 14:52:18 +0300   1) [![build status](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-docs/badges/master/build.svg)](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/gitlab-docs/commits/master)
fb0fc7d6 (Achilleas Pipinellis     2016-11-07 22:21:22 +0100   2)
^764ca75 (Connor Shea              2016-10-05 23:40:24 -0600   3) # GitLab Documentation
^764ca75 (Connor Shea              2016-10-05 23:40:24 -0600   4)
0e62ed6d (Mike Jang                2019-11-26 21:44:53 +0000   5) This project hosts the repository used to generate the GitLab
0e62ed6d (Mike Jang                2019-11-26 21:44:53 +0000   6) documentation website and deployed to https://docs.gitlab.com. It uses the

File blame through the API

You can also get this information over the Git file blame REST API.