I often move between work computer and home computer, and pick up work on a repository after months or even years of not doing anything with it. I recently did this with a few repositories to fix them up. I also moved jobs last year. So, I have a new work computer but want to commit with my personal email address, not my work address, and I had not updated the local user.email for one of the old repos.
These are my notes so I don’t have to go searching through StackOverflow every time.
An additional weird problem I just found is that I use the same profile picture for most things so I can’t quickly tell the difference between commits on GitHub. Slowly scrolling, then… Scrolling through git log… I could probably find a command for showing commit information on one line… Anyway.
To find current configuration
git config --listand specifically for email address
git config user.emailI don’t want to change the email address globally for this computer, I just want to change for the repository i.e. locally.
git config --local user.email "your_email@abc.example"Reference: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37805621/change-email-address-in-git
Now, I want to change previous commits, specifically their email address.
This looks like what I want:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/750172/how-do-i-change-the-author-and-committer-name-email-for-multiple-commits
Other references:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/28536980/git-change-commit-date-to-author-date
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2919878/git-rewrite-previous-commit-usernames-and-emails
git rebase -r <some commit before all of your bad commits> \
--exec 'git commit --amend --no-edit --reset-author'Except, this is not what I want, because I don’t really want to change all of the metadata. This changes the dates and times of old commits, which I don’t really want to do.
I also don’t know how to get rid of what I’ve just done, since git pull does a merge into the main branch. I have deleted the local repo and cloned the GitHub copy into the same place. Drastic! It’s quick though.
Notes: it looks like filter-branch is not a good idea; I am not worried about force pushing or for others to use my work, it’s only me using a private repo; I would like to keep the dates of old commits even though it doesn’t actually matter; I don’t have any tags on commits; I don’t want to filter certain email addresses, I just want all the same email address.
This answer will work for the latest commit only, after changing the user name and email.
git commit --amend --reset-author --no-edit Then this answer shows up, way down the list
https://stackoverflow.com/a/75841127
git commit --amend --author 'My Name <email@example.com>' --no-edit And this is what we want! Glorious.
git rebase -r <commit/branch before wrong author and email or '--root' for all commits> --exec "git commit --amend --no-edit --author 'My Name <email@example.com>'"Then to get those changes back to a remote repository, -f to force
git push -fThanks for listening.
Post Script:
Two things that I had to do recently, rename a branch and push to remote automatically.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6591213/how-can-i-rename-a-local-git-branch
Rename the current branch:
git branch -m <newname>or rename any branch from old to new
git branch -m <oldname> <newname>When adding a new branch locally, I want to be able to write git push and have the remote set to track the local automatically. Run this once and future branches will be good to go.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/29422101/automatically-track-remote-branch-with-git
git config --global --type bool push.autoSetupRemote true