Change old commit message on Git

Question

I was trying to edit an old commit message as explained here    The thing is that now  when I try to run rebase -i HEAD 5 it says interactive rebase already started   So then I try  git rebase --continue but got this error   error  Ref refs heads master is at 7c1645b447a8ea86ee143dd08400710c419b945b but expected c7577b53d05c91026b9906b6d29c1cf44117d6ba fatal  Cannot lock the ref  refs heads master     Any ideas

User · Answer

Here s a very nice Gist that covers all the possible cases  https   gist github com nepsilon 156387acf9e1e72d48fa35c4fabef0b4  Overview   git rebase -i HEAD X   X is the number of commits to go back   Move to the line of your commit  change pick into edit    then change your commit message  git commit --amend   Finish the rebase with  git rebase --continue

User · Answer

As Gregg Lind suggested  you can use reword to be prompted to only change the commit message  and leave the commit intact otherwise    git rebase -i HEAD n   Here  n is the list of last n commits    For example  if you use git rebase -i HEAD 4  you may see something like this   pick e459d80 Do xyz pick 0459045 Do something pick 90fdeab Do something else pick facecaf Do abc   Now replace pick with reword for the commits you want to edit the messages of   pick e459d80 Do xyz reword 0459045 Do something reword 90fdeab Do something else pick facecaf Do abc   Exit the editor after saving the file  and next you will be prompted to edit the messages for the commits you had marked reword  in one file per message  Note that it would ve been much simpler to just edit the commit messages when you replaced pick with reword  but doing that has no effect   Learn more on GitHub s page for Changing a commit message

User · Answer

It says   When you save and exit the editor  it will rewind you back to that last commit in that list and drop you on the command line with the following message     git rebase -i HEAD 3 Stopped at 7482e0d    updated the gemspec to hopefully work better You can amend the commit now  with  It does not mean   type again  git rebase -i HEAD 3  Try to not typing  git rebase -i HEAD 3 when exiting the editor  and it should work fine   otherwise  in your particular situation  a git rebase -i --abort might be needed to reset everything and allow you to try again   As Dave Vogt mentions in the comments  git rebase --continue is for going to the next task in the rebasing process  after you ve amended the first commit  Also  Gregg Lind mentions in his answer the reword command of git rebase   By replacing the command  quot pick quot  with the command  quot edit quot   you can tell git rebase to stop after applying that commit  so that you can edit the files and or the commit message  amend the commit  and continue rebasing  If you just want to edit the commit message for a commit  replace the command  quot pick quot  with the command  quot reword quot   since Git1 6 6  January 2010   It does the same thing    edit    does during an interactive rebase  except it only lets you edit the commit message without returning control to the shell  This is  extremely useful  Currently if you want to clean up your commit messages you have to     git rebase -i next   Then set all the commits to    edit      Then on each one     Change the message in your editor    git commit --amend   git rebase --continue   Using    reword    instead of    edit    lets you skip the git-commit and git-rebase calls

User · Answer

If you don t want to deal with interactive mode then do this  Update your last pushed commit git commit --amend -m  quot New commit message  quot   Push your new commit message  this will replace the old last commit message to this new one  git push origin --force   branch-name    More on this - https   linuxize com post change-git-commit-message

User · Answer

FWIW  git rebase interactive now has a  reword  option  which makes this much less painful

User · Answer

Just wanted to provide a different option for this  In my case  I usually work on my individual branches then merge to master  and the individual commits I do to my local are not that important  Due to a git hook that checks for the appropriate ticket number on Jira but was case sensitive  I was prevented from pushing my code  Also  the commit was done long ago and I didn t want to count how many commits to go back on the rebase  So what I did was to create a new branch from latest master and squash all commits from problem branch into a single commit on new branch  It was easier for me and I think it s good idea to have it here as future reference  From latest master  git checkout -b new-branch  Then git merge --squash problem-branch git commit -m  quot new message quot    Referece  https   github com rotati wiki wiki Git -Combine-all-messy-commits-into-one-commit-before-merging-to-Master-branch

[git] Change old commit message on Git

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