rewrite-git-author

Usage

Back-up

Recommended, so you can easily roll back if you mess up.

Push your work.

Or make a duplicate branch.

$ git checkout main
$ git checkout -b main-backup
$ git checkout main

Also make sure that if others are working on the repo as you that they are expecting this change.

Run

What it does

The script will do a rebase of all commits. Even if the email address is not matched, the rebase will still be done.

You are overwriting git history by editing commits and not adding new ones on top of the old and so will have to a do force push at the end.

This affects the email of both commit author and committer fields.

Steps

1. Navigate to your repo.
   • Make to sure to be in the root, since when you rebase you are rewinding the history to when there were zero directories and then you’ll get an error.
2. Make sure all changes are committed or stashed - nothing is left unstaged.
3. Run the tool.
   • Reference it by its full path.

       $ ~/scripts/rewrite_author.sh OLD_EMAIL NEW_MAIL
     

   • Or run from your executables directory from anywhere.

       $ rewrite_author.sh OLD_EMAIL NEW_MAIL
     

4. Use git log to verify your changes.
5. Do a force push to GitHub.

    $ git push --force
   

6. Pull in changes on other machines. Give these instructions to other collaborators on your repo to avoid getting errors when they push or pull.

    $ git fetch
    $ git reset --hard origin/main  # or origin/master
   

Sample output of the script.

Rewrite 80b85af8f4454c2c7b820ed13229897262f18bb2 (11/14) (1 seconds passed, remaining 0 predicted)
Ref 'refs/heads/main' was rewritten
Ref 'refs/heads/test' was rewritten
Ref 'refs/tags/v0.1.0' was rewritten

Undo changes

Okay so you messed up your main branch.

Here is how to undo.

Warning the tags got rewritten, and the steps here will not bring them back.

Assuming the content on the remote (like GitHub) is good, do this:

$ git fetch 
$ git reset --hard origin/main

If you used a back-up branch, restore from that:

$ git reset --hard main-backup

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