git count-objects

Loose objects, packs, sizes. Quick health check.

🎯 What & why

git count-objects reports how much disk Git is using — loose objects vs packed, garbage, and unreachables. The cheap first check before you reach for git gc or git repack.

🧠 Mental model

Inventory of .git/objects/. Without -v you get loose-object count and size; with -v you get the full breakdown including packs and what's preventing pruning.

🛠️ Synopsis

git count-objects [-v | --verbose] [-H | --human-readable]

🎚️ Switches & options

Flag	What it does
`-v` / `--verbose`	Full breakdown: count, size, in-pack, packs, size-pack, prune-packable, garbage, size-garbage.
`-H` / `--human-readable`	Print sizes as KiB/MiB/GiB instead of raw KiB integers.

💡 Use cases

Quick is this repo bloated? check before opening a perf ticket.
Confirming that git gc actually packed the loose objects you expected.
Spotting garbage (corrupt or orphan files in .git/objects) early.
CI sanity check that prune-packable (loose copies of packed objects) hasn't blown up.

🧪 Examples

Quick loose-object glance

git count-objects

Full breakdown, human-readable

git count-objects -vH

After a gc, verify in-pack jumped

git gc && git count-objects -v

Watch a repack reduce loose count

git repack -ad && git count-objects -v

🎓 Recommendations

Always pair -v with -H — the raw KiB column is hard to read on big repos.
If prune-packable keeps growing, schedule git gc --prune=now (read the docs first).
Treat any non-zero garbage as a signal to investigate before it spreads.

🪤 Common pitfalls

Loose-object size ignores objects/pack/ — reading it as total repo size is wrong.
garbage includes anything Git doesn't recognise in objects/ — sometimes it's just a stale tempfile, sometimes corruption.
-v output is whitespace-formatted key/value lines, not stable JSON; parsers should be defensive.

🔗 Related modules

📝 Quiz

Hit each option, then Check answers. Score is recorded; Next is always open.