Git file blame

Introduced in GitLab 2.5

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

You can find the Blame button with each file in a project.

File blame button

When you select the Blame button, you'll see a screen with the noted information:

Git blame output

If you hover over a commit in the UI, you'll see a precise date and time for that commit.

Blame previous commit

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

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

You'll see output 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.