Read more

Git: Change author of a commit

Arne Hartherz
October 07, 2011Software engineer at makandra GmbH

Using git rebase can be painful but luckily you can resort to cheating with git reset and committing anew.
Now what if you wanted to rebase commits of other people and still wish them to be the authors of their code? Easy: make them the author of a commit you made.

Illustration web development

Do you need DevOps-experts?

Your development team has a full backlog? No time for infrastructure architecture? Our DevOps team is ready to support you!

  • We build reliable cloud solutions with Infrastructure as code
  • We are experts in security, Linux and databases
  • We support your dev team to perform
Read more Show archive.org snapshot

When you have freshly staged changes that are ready to be committed, just use the --author switch:

git commit -m "Hello Universe" --author="Philip J Fry <someone@example.com>"

If you already committed, just change the ownership of the last commit by using the --amend switch like that:

git commit --amend --author="Philip J Fry <someone@example.com>"

Changing several commits in the git history

Note: You should not change commits that you already pushed to master/production.

If you want to change several commits, you may rebase interactively and specify the commits you want to change:

git rebase -i origin/master

# In the rebase list, replace 'pick' with 'edit' (or 'e') for each commit you want to change.

Git will rebase, stopping at each commit you marked. Now do this for each commit you marked:

  1. git commit --amend --author="Philip J Fry <someone@example.com>"
  2. git rebase --continue

Changing many commits

There is a script on GitHub Show archive.org snapshot that changes all commits with a certain email address to the author and committer you specify. Use at your own risk.

Posted by Arne Hartherz to makandra dev (2011-10-07 15:42)