Troubleshooting commits on your timeline

In this article

• Expected behavior to view commit details
• Missing commit details from commits in your timeline
• How GitHub uses the Git author date and commit date
• Viewing missing commit details from commits in your timeline
• Expected commits missing in your timeline

Expected behavior to view commit details

On your profile page's timeline, you can click the number of commits next to a specific repository to see more details about your commits from that time period, including a diff of specific changes made in a repository.

Missing commit details from commits in your timeline

If you click a commit link from your profile page and don't see all of the expected commits on the repository's commits page, then it's possible the commit history in Git was rewritten and the commit author date and the commit date are different.

How GitHub uses the Git author date and commit date

In Git, the author date is when someone first creates a commit with git commit. The commit date is identical to the author date unless someone changes the commit date by using git commit --amend, a force push, a rebase, or other Git commands.

On your profile page, the author date is used to calculate when a commit was made. Whereas, in a repository, the commit date is used to calculate when a commit was made in the repository.

Most often, the author date and commit date are the same but you may notice that your commit sequence is out of order if the commit history is changed. For more information, see "Why are my contributions not showing up on my profile?"

Viewing missing commit details from commits in your timeline

You can use the git show command with the --pretty=fuller flag to check if the commit author date and commit date are different.

$ git show Your commit SHA number --pretty=fuller
commit Your commit SHA number
Author:     octocat user email
AuthorDate: Wed Jul 13 02:02:30 2016 +0900
Commit:     Sally Johnson user email
CommitDate: Wed Jul 20 06:25:08 2016 +0900

If the author and commit date are different, you can manually change the commit date in the URL to see the commit details.

For example:

• This URL uses the author date of 2016-07-13:

  https://github.com/your-organization-or-personal-account/your-repository/commits?author=octocat&since=2016-07-13T00:00:00Z&until=2016-07-13T23:59:59Z

• This URL uses the commit date of 2016-07-19:

  https://github.com/your-organization-or-personal-account/your-repository/commits?author=octocat&since=2016-07-19T00:00:00Z&until=2016-07-19T23:59:59Z

When you open the URL with the modified commit date, you can see the commit details.

Expected commits missing in your timeline

If you're not seeing expected commits on your timeline, it's possible the commit history in Git was rewritten and the commit author date and the commit date are different. For other possibilities, see "Why are my contributions not showing up on my profile?"