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

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

Answer 2

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

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

Check the docs, you can do the same thing for Deleted, Modified, etc.

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 3

The following maybe not is 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 especifiqly File Annotation, Visit https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Tools-Debugging-with-Git

ex. git blame -L 174,190 xx.py