Question

I have a codebase of Javascript files that I use to drive a Web site. To synchronize the many files in deployment, I name the files with an appended version number. I have a “master” file that contains current version numbers for the different components. This is used to generate the script tags in the HTML file.

I have the codebase set up as a Git repository. But because of the way I am managing this with version numbers, any time I deploy a new file set, I issue

git mv file.old-vers.js file.new-vers.js

This works in general, except that Git treats this as a complete new file, and so I lose the history of changes.

Question: is there a way to tell Git to maintain continuity? (i.e. that even though the file name has changed, that it remains the same entity)

Answer 1

git log can track renames. Try git log --follow path/to/file.