Git commit with no commit message

git generally requires a non-empty message because providing a meaningful commit message is part of good development practice and good repository stewardship. The first line of the commit message is used all over the place within git; for more, read "A Note About Git Commit Messages".

If you open Terminal.app, cd to your project directory, and git commit -am '', you will see that it fails because an empty commit message is not allowed. Newer versions of git have the
--allow-empty-message commandline argument, including the version of git included with the latest version of Xcode. This will let you use this command to make a commit with an empty message:

git commit -a --allow-empty-message -m ''

Prior to the --allow-empty-message flag, you had to use the commit-tree plumbing command. You can see an example of using this command in the "Raw Git" chapter of the Git book.

And if you add an alias for it then it's even better right?

git config --global alias.nccommit 'commit -a --allow-empty-message -m ""'

Now you just do an nccommit, nc because of no comment, and everything should be commited.

When working on an important code update, if you really need an intermediate checkpoint you might just do:

git commit -am'.'

or shorter:

git commit -am.

This adds a commit with the message .