cloc: Count Lines of Code in Many Programming Languages

Updated: 28 September 2026 · Applies to: cloc 1.98 to 2.10 on Ubuntu 24.04 and 26.04, Debian 13, AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux 9 and 10 (EPEL)

cloc ("count lines of code") counts the lines in a project and splits them into code, comments and blank lines, per programming language. It is useful for estimating the size of a code base before a migration or audit, or for comparing two versions. It understands several hundred languages and can read Git repositories and archives directly.

Install cloc

apt install cloc                                  # Ubuntu, Debian
dnf install epel-release && dnf install cloc       # AlmaLinux, Rocky Linux

EPEL has the current version 2.10; Ubuntu 24.04 has 1.98 and Debian 13 has 2.04. The newest release is always on the project's GitHub page as a single Perl script.

Count a project

cloc /var/www/myapp

The result is a table with one line per language: number of files, blank lines, comment lines and code lines, with a total at the end.

Useful options

cloc --exclude-dir=vendor,node_modules,.git /var/www/myapp   # skip dependencies
cloc --by-file /var/www/myapp                                 # per file instead of per language
cloc --include-lang=PHP,JavaScript /var/www/myapp             # only some languages
cloc project.tar.gz                                           # count inside an archive
cloc --vcs=git /path/to/repo                                  # only files tracked by Git

Compare two versions

cloc --diff myapp-1.0/ myapp-2.0/

This shows lines added, removed, modified and unchanged per language.

Output for reports

cloc --csv --quiet /var/www/myapp > loc.csv
cloc --json /var/www/myapp > loc.json

Tips

• Always exclude third-party folders such as vendor and node_modules, or they will dominate the result.
• Minified or generated files inflate the counts; exclude them with --not-match-f='\.min\.js$'.

Official documentation: cloc on GitHub.