Find commit where file was added

Question

Say I have a file foo.js that was committed some time ago. I would like to simply find the commit where this file was first added.

After reading the answers and my own tinkering, this works for me

git log --follow --diff-filter=A --find-renames=40% foo.js

Answer 1

Here's simpler, "pure Git" way to do it, with no pipeline needed:

git log --diff-filter=A -- foo.js

Check the documentation. You can do the same thing for Deleted, Modified, etc.

https://git-scm.com/docs/git-log#Documentation/git-log.txt---diff-filterACDMRTUXB82308203

I have a handy alias for this, because I always forget it:

git config --global alias.whatadded 'log --diff-filter=A'

This makes it as simple as:

git whatadded -- foo.js

Answer 2

git log --oneline -- foo.js | tail -n 1

Answer 3

The following may not be not of you interest, but I think it will help you in future and is part of debugging ecosystem in Git:

You can use git-blame to show what revision and author last modified each line of a file, especially file annotation. Visit https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Debugging-with-Git

For example,

git blame -L 174,190  xx.py