Count number of lines in a git repository

Question

How would I count the total number of lines present in all the files in a git repository?

git ls-files gives me a list of files tracked by git.

Answer 1

If you want this count because you want to get an idea of the project’s scope, you may prefer the output of CLOC (“Count Lines of Code”), which gives you a breakdown of significant and insignificant lines of code by language.

cloc $(git ls-files)

(This line is equivalent to git ls-files | xargs cloc. It uses sh’s $() command substitution feature.)

Sample output:

      20 text files.
      20 unique files.                              
       6 files ignored.

http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.62  T=0.22 s (62.5 files/s, 2771.2 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language                     files          blank        comment           code
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Javascript                       2             13            111            309
JSON                             3              0              0             58
HTML                             2              7             12             50
Handlebars                       2              0              0             37
CoffeeScript                     4              1              4             12
SASS                             1              1              1              5
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                            14             22            128            471
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You will have to install CLOC first. You can probably install cloc with your package manager – for example, brew install cloc with Homebrew.

cloc $(git ls-files) is often an improvement over cloc .. For example, the above sample output with git ls-files reports 471 lines of code. For the same project, cloc . reports a whopping 456,279 lines (and takes six minutes to run), because it searches the dependencies in the Git-ignored node_modules folder.