Change Author Info of Past Commits - egnomerator/misc GitHub Wiki

Helpful Links

Change Author and Committer

  • This link is to a Stack Overflow post requesting help to change author information on past commits

Push with Force flag

  • If performing the below operation(s) results in re-writing public history, then pushing changes with require the force flag

In case the link included above ever breaks, here is the pertinent information from the Stack Overflow post

Original poster's question:

I would like to change my name, surname and email in my all commits, is it possible?

Answer (more than one answer was given, but I found this one to be most thorough):

To rewrite both author and committer in all selected commits:

git filter-branch --commit-filter \
'if [ "$GIT_AUTHOR_NAME" = "OldAuthor Name" ]; then \
export GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="Author Name";\
export [email protected];\
export GIT_COMMITTER_NAME="Commmiter Name";\
export [email protected];\
fi;\
git commit-tree "$@"'

TLDR Why Change Author Information of Past Commits

My personal use case for this action was the following:

  • I had been working on a personal project for awhile making commits under certain author information
  • I later decided to use a particular set of author information for all of my personal projects
  • I began using my chosen author information for new commits on that personal project
  • I realized I wanted to have my commit history show the same author information for all my commits
    • Since I was the only committer on the project, I wanted all the author information to be consistent
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