This is the first ever commit of GitHub.

[sunn-e]

Hey, the curiosity led me here. I hope you are doing well. So this is the first ever GitHub repo and this is the first commit. :)

[donno2048]

Exactly how I got here too.

This is a bit weird since according to Wikipedia, GitHub was Founded on February 8, 2008, and the Development of the GitHub platform began on October 19, 2007, but the date of the commit is October 10, 2007.

It is possible that the git history has been modified, but I guess the information on Wikipedia is just wrong (that's assuming this commit is actually the first commit on GitHub and not just an early commit on git (which is completely different) pushed to GitHub which is very likely)

Edit: Ok, in the API address of this repo (https://api.github.com/repos/mojombo/grit) the created_at is 2007-10-29T14:37:16Z, so I guess this is really the first repo on GitHub and the date wasn't resulting by importing from git...

[toydotgame]

@donno2048, it is most likely just old Git history being pushed to GitHub. angular/angular.js has two commits from December 31st, 1969 (866346e and eaa397c). They're made by just setting your system time to something, running git commit, then setting it back to the present (to get HTTPS to work with Git), and pushing. Most likely, this repo had commits, and they were pushed to this GitHub Git server after GitHub [and this repo] were created.

The real first commit on GitHub will be much harder to find...

[donno2048]

@toydotgame Even if the git history was pushed to GitHub from Git it doesn't explain the _createdat date of this repo which is 2007-10-29T14:37:16Z which is four months before GitHub was founded on February 8, 2008.

[sunn-e]

You are right, I talked to the author of that repo and they said the same thing. The git is different than github so previously the author used a different platform so the date comes from there.

[AkhilTThomas]

https://github.com/boostorg/boost/commit/ce5e16b6ae28e66369cdcfc6c416db64fd0298ba this is from 2000! oldest i have seen so far

[donno2048]

https://github.com/boostorg/boost/commit/ce5e16b6ae28e66369cdcfc6c416db64fd0298ba this is from 2000! oldest i have seen so far

Not impressive at all as you can just change the git date...

[charles0830]

Anyone can do some magic in the repo's .git holder. Some users I've seen joined GitHub on 2/17/2023, but the power has been there since 2014. https://github.com/codeninja819 I noticed that all information about GiHub is kept in the .git holder. A project that uses this to create Github's fake commit history is also working.

[toydotgame]

I can timedatectl my system time to a Unix time of 0 and git commit, then reset the time/NTP to current time, git push to GitHub, and I'll end up with a profile going back to 1970 despite creating this account in 2020.

[dfischer]

@toydotgame how to do that on the Universal SDK that Reality runs on?

[toydotgame]

What do you mean? Change the system time and make a commit, reset the time to now and push? That's all I described.

[donno2048]

GIT_COMMITTER_DATE=`date -d@0` git commit

[jroper]

There is no such thing as a first commit to GitHub, since you don't commit to GitHub. You push to GitHub. When you push, you send it, among other things, one or more commits that may have happened at any time in history. Of course, since GitHub added a merge button to pull requests, back in 2011 I think, it is possible to create commits on GitHub itself, but prior to that, no commits were ever created on GitHub. We could talk about what was the first push to GitHub. But, GitHub doesn't store (at least in a publicly accessible location) when a commit was pushed to GitHub, so there's no way to determine that. Of course, since this is Tom Preston Warner's repo, and he is one of the founders of GitHub, and this project would have been crucial for the development of GitHub, and that commit was his commit, it is very possible that the commit that OP linked to was the first commit ever to be pushed to GitHub. But there's no way to be sure of that.

The first ever commit made using git is easy to find, it's here, from April 2005:

https://github.com/git/git/commit/e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23ca2e25604af290

That's Linus' first commit to git, it was made a day after he started developing git, once he had developed enough of git to be able to support committing to it, and then he committed that code to git.

It is not however the oldest legitimate commit in a git repository. There are older, legitimate commits, however they weren't made using git, they were made using another SCM, and then migrated into git when that project switched from whatever SCM it was using to git.

Here's the first commit in the BitKeeper repository for example, it was made using BitKeeper in March 1999, and migrated to git I guess in 2016 when they open sourced BitKeeper:

https://github.com/bitkeeper-scm/bitkeeper/commit/d4397fb3ec73362f39250221cb9112862f16fa17

I would guess that that was the first ever commit to BitKeeper.

But, I'm sure there are older commits if you look hard enough. Just find some old open source projects. Here's one from 1996 on Samba:

https://github.com/samba-team/samba/commit/97e3422f41d94209577713af4f3a94e97d6c4eda

That commit has been migrated through 3 SCMs, it was first made in CVS, then migrated to Subversion, and then migrated to git. Though, it's not actually the first commit on Samba, as Samba was first released in 1992. It appears that prior to using CVS, Samba used RCS (at least, that's what some of the early commit messages imply), but it appears that apparently the RCS history wasn't imported into CVS when Samba switched to CVS.

The oldest commit ever would be from 1972, back when SCCS, the first SCM, was released. We could probably guess that, like most other SCM tools, the first commit to it was SCCS itself. Is that repo available anywhere, was it migrated into any other SCM? I don't know.

[fredericEducentre]

By listing all repositories with https://api.github.com/repositories, we can see that the first public repository created is effectively https://github.com/mojombo/grit.

Using the GUI of Github to go in the past we could say that this (https://github.com/mojombo/grit/commit/5f141d9c0181b8732c0ec2fab4967f0ffa24fa3f) is the first commit push on github.

However if you change the parameter on the query string like that (https://github.com/mojombo/grit/commits/master/?since=2000-10-29&until=2007-10-29) to go backward we got the "initial grit setup".

Documentation of the Github API : https://docs.github.com/en/rest/repos/repos?apiVersion=2022-11-28#list-public-repositories

[emperor6inch]

wow this is so cool

[enochCodes]

who know's, fdjdfkf kdfdfkdfe ehjkl ohhhhh its not me its my cats typo error lol . . . can i call the function funccccc or cccccnuf

[namansingh1314]

There is no such thing as a first commit to GitHub, since you don't commit to GitHub. You push to GitHub. When you push, you send it, among other things, one or more commits that may have happened at any time in history. Of course, since GitHub added a merge button to pull requests, back in 2011 I think, it is possible to create commits on GitHub itself, but prior to that, no commits were ever created on GitHub. We could talk about what was the first push to GitHub. But, GitHub doesn't store (at least in a publicly accessible location) when a commit was pushed to GitHub, so there's no way to determine that. Of course, since this is Tom Preston Warner's repo, and he is one of the founders of GitHub, and this project would have been crucial for the development of GitHub, and that commit was his commit, it is very possible that the commit that OP linked to was the first commit ever to be pushed to GitHub. But there's no way to be sure of that.

The first ever commit made using git is easy to find, it's here, from April 2005:

git/git@e83c516

That's Linus' first commit to git, it was made a day after he started developing git, once he had developed enough of git to be able to support committing to it, and then he committed that code to git.

It is not however the oldest legitimate commit in a git repository. There are older, legitimate commits, however they weren't made using git, they were made using another SCM, and then migrated into git when that project switched from whatever SCM it was using to git.

Here's the first commit in the BitKeeper repository for example, it was made using BitKeeper in March 1999, and migrated to git I guess in 2016 when they open sourced BitKeeper:

bitkeeper-scm/bitkeeper@d4397fb

I would guess that that was the first ever commit to BitKeeper.

But, I'm sure there are older commits if you look hard enough. Just find some old open source projects. Here's one from 1996 on Samba:

samba-team/samba@97e3422

That commit has been migrated through 3 SCMs, it was first made in CVS, then migrated to Subversion, and then migrated to git. Though, it's not actually the first commit on Samba, as Samba was first released in 1992. It appears that prior to using CVS, Samba used RCS (at least, that's what some of the early commit messages imply), but it appears that apparently the RCS history wasn't imported into CVS when Samba switched to CVS.

The oldest commit ever would be from 1972, back when SCCS, the first SCM, was released. We could probably guess that, like most other SCM tools, the first commit to it was SCCS itself. Is that repo available anywhere, was it migrated into any other SCM? I don't know.

[namansingh1314]

https://github.com/syvaidya/openstego/commit/9a6fa5b8f966c7a2e4e82b3cbba8e18f1914f313 this one led me here lol.