Clever Geek Handbook

Git filter branch from HEAD

I recently forked, committed and made a pull request to a public repository where I am not a contributor. My pull request is not yet merged.

Looking through my commits, I realized that I was using the wrong author name and I want to fix it. I tried to do a rebase, which works great:

git rebase -i HEAD~7

Then I have edited

all the commits in question and based on that answer have successfully changed the author of the commits .

git commit --amend --author "James <email@example.com>" --no-edit && \
git rebase --continue

So far so good, but I noticed that this changes the commit time to the current time. I want to keep the previous timestamps. I tried following this answer , but filter-branch

it seems to have changed the hashes for the entire repository.

I probably shouldn't force it. And even if I did, it would probably make it so my pull request could not be merged. So, I tried to find a way to run filter-branch

for the last few commits on the branch, but I couldn't find anything. I tried:

git filter-branch --env-filter 'GIT_COMMITTER_DATE=$GIT_AUTHOR_DATE; export GIT_COMMITTER_DATE' HEAD~7

But it doesn't work. It exits with an error message:

What ref do you want to rewrite?

What should I do? Is it possible?

Should I look into the flag --committer-date-is-author-date

for rebase? What does it do?

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2 answers


Just pass the range of fixes you want git filter-branch

, for example:



git filter-branch --env-filter 'GIT_COMMITTER_DATE=$GIT_AUTHOR_DATE; export GIT_COMMITTER_DATE' HEAD~7..HEAD
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I wouldn't bother with that. Note that although the commit date changes, the author's date is preserved.

If you think about it, it makes sense given the semantics of git: whenever the SHA of a commit changes, it is a new commit, and the commit date should change too.

However, the following should work:

$ git rebase --committer-date-is-author-date --onto origin/master master my-feature-branch

The above command will take all commits on my-feature-branch

that are not in master

and reinstall them on top origin/master

. Due to the provided --committer-date-is-author-date

, the author's date will be duplicated on the commit date, but only if you don't use -i

or --interactive

.

This should work even if you've rewritten your local history, although I haven't tried it.



Regarding the rebase command:

Here's a general view:

$ git rebase --onto NEW_BASE OLD_BASE SOME_BRANCH

If SOME_BRANCH

is a branch from OLD_BASE

, this will take all commits between OLD_BASE

and SOME_BRANCH

and apply them to NEW_BASE

instead OLD_BASE

.

Here's a more specific command based on a few links you've provided:

$ git rebase --committer-date-is-author-date --onto origin/master HEAD~7 my-feature-branch
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