Change first commit of project with Git

Question

I want to change something in the first commit of my project with out losing all subsequent commits  Is there any way to do this   I accidentally listed my raw email in a comment within the source code  and I d like to change it as I m getting spammed from bots indexing GitHub

User · Accepted Answer

As mentioned by ecdpalma below  git 1 7 12   August 2012  has enhanced the option --root for git rebase    git rebase  -i  --root  tip  can now be used to rewrite all the history leading to   tip  down to the root commit   That new behavior was initially discussed here      I personally think  git rebase -i --root  should be made to just work without requiring  --onto  and let you  edit  even the first one in the history    It is understandable that nobody bothered  as people are a lot less often rewriting near the very beginning of the history than otherwise     The patch followed      original answer  February 2010   As mentioned in the Git FAQ  and this SO question   the idea is    Create new temporary branch  Rewind it to the commit you want to change using git reset --hard Change that commit  it would be top of current HEAD  and you can modify the content of any file  Rebase branch on top of changed commit  using   git rebase --onto  lt tmp branch gt   lt commit after changed gt   lt branch gt      The trick is to be sure the information you want to remove is not reintroduced by a later commit somewhere else in your file  If you suspect that  then you have to use filter-branch --tree-filter to make sure the content of that file does not contain in any commit the sensible information   In both cases  you end up rewriting the SHA1 of every commit  so be careful if you have already published the branch you are modifying the contents of  You probably shouldn   t do it unless your project isn   t yet public and other people haven   t based work off the commits you   re about to rewrite

User · Answer

git rebase -i allows you to conveniently edit any previous commits  except for the root commit  The following commands show you how to do this manually     tag the old root   git rev-list      will return the hash of first commit git tag root  git rev-list HEAD   tail -1     switch to a new branch pointing at the first commit git checkout -b new-root root    make any edits and then commit them with  git commit --amend    check out the previous branch  i e  master  git checkout   -1     replace old root with amended version git rebase --onto new-root root    you might encounter merge conflicts  fix any conflicts and continue with    git rebase --continue    delete the branch  new-root  git branch -d new-root    delete the tag  root  git tag -d root

User · Answer

As stated in 1 7 12 Release Notes  you may use    git rebase -i --root

User · Answer

If you want to modify only the first commit  you may try git rebase and amend the commit  which is similar to this post  How to modify a specified commit in git   And if you want to modify all the commits which contain the raw email  filter-branch is the best choice  There is an example of how to change email address globally on the book Pro Git  and you may find this link useful http   git-scm com book en Git-Tools-Rewriting-History

[git] Change first commit of project with Git?

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