How do I edit an incorrect commit message in git that I ve pushed

Question

I want to modify a commit message deeper in history and I ve pushed many new commits    How do I change the commit message  Is it possible

User · Answer

At our shop  I introduced the convention of adding recognizably named annotated tags to commits with incorrect messages  and using the annotation as the replacement   Even though this doesn t help folks who run casual  git log  commands  it does provide us with a way to fix incorrect bug tracker references in the comments  and all my build and release tools understand the convention   This is obviously not a generic answer  but it might be something folks can adopt within specific communities  I m sure if this is used on a larger scale  some sort of porcelain support for it may crop up  eventually

User · Answer

The message from Linus Torvalds may answer your question   Modify edit old commit messages  Short answer  you can not  if pushed      extract  Linus refers to BitKeeper as BK       Side note  just out of historical interest  in BK you could       And if you re used to it  like I was  it was really quite practical  I    would apply a patch-bomb from Andrew  notice something was wrong  and just    edit it before pushing it out       I could have done the same with git  It would have been easy enough to    make just the commit message not be part of the name  and still guarantee    that the history was untouched  and allow the  fix up comments later     thing       But I didn t       Part of it is purely  internal consistency   Git is simply a cleaner    system thanks to everything being SHA1-protected  and all objects being    treated the same  regardless of object type  Yeah  there are four    different kinds of objects  and they are all really different  and they    can t be used in the same way  but at the same time  even if their    encoding might be different on disk  conceptually they all work exactly    the same       But internal consistency isn t really an excuse for being inflexible  and    clearly it would be very flexible if we could just fix up mistakes after    they happen  So that s not a really strong argument       The real reason git doesn t allow you to change the commit message ends    up being very simple  that way  you can trust the messages  If you allowed    people to change them afterwards  the messages are inherently not very    trustworthy      To be complete  you could rewrite your local commit history in order to reflect what you want  as suggested by sykora  with some rebase and reset --hard  gasp    However  once you publish your revised history again  with a git push origin  master master  the   sign forcing the push to occur  even if it doesn t result in a  fast-forward  commit     you might get into some trouble   Extract from this other SO question      I actually once pushed with --force to git git repository and got scolded by Linus BIG TIME  It will create a lot of problems for other people  A simple answer is  don t do it

User · Answer

You can use git rebase -i  against the branch you branched from   i  for interactive   Replace the pick next to the commit comment you wish to change with r  or reword   save and exit and upon doing so you ll be able to make the edit   git push once again and you re done

User · Answer

If you are using Git Extensions  go into the Commit screen  there should be a checkbox that says  Amend Commit  at the bottom  as can be seen below

User · Answer

Currently a git replace might do the trick   In detail  Create a temporary work branch   git checkout -b temp   Reset to the commit to replace  git reset --hard  lt sha1 gt    Amend the commit with the right message  git commit --amend -m   lt right message gt     Replace the old commit with the new one  git replace  lt old commit sha1 gt   lt new commit sha1 gt    go back to the branch where you were  git checkout  lt branch gt    remove temp branch  git branch -D temp   push  guess   done

User · Answer

The message from Linus Torvalds may answer your question   Modify edit old commit messages  Short answer  you can not  if pushed      extract  Linus refers to BitKeeper as BK       Side note  just out of historical interest  in BK you could       And if you re used to it  like I was  it was really quite practical  I    would apply a patch-bomb from Andrew  notice something was wrong  and just    edit it before pushing it out       I could have done the same with git  It would have been easy enough to    make just the commit message not be part of the name  and still guarantee    that the history was untouched  and allow the  fix up comments later     thing       But I didn t       Part of it is purely  internal consistency   Git is simply a cleaner    system thanks to everything being SHA1-protected  and all objects being    treated the same  regardless of object type  Yeah  there are four    different kinds of objects  and they are all really different  and they    can t be used in the same way  but at the same time  even if their    encoding might be different on disk  conceptually they all work exactly    the same       But internal consistency isn t really an excuse for being inflexible  and    clearly it would be very flexible if we could just fix up mistakes after    they happen  So that s not a really strong argument       The real reason git doesn t allow you to change the commit message ends    up being very simple  that way  you can trust the messages  If you allowed    people to change them afterwards  the messages are inherently not very    trustworthy      To be complete  you could rewrite your local commit history in order to reflect what you want  as suggested by sykora  with some rebase and reset --hard  gasp    However  once you publish your revised history again  with a git push origin  master master  the   sign forcing the push to occur  even if it doesn t result in a  fast-forward  commit     you might get into some trouble   Extract from this other SO question      I actually once pushed with --force to git git repository and got scolded by Linus BIG TIME  It will create a lot of problems for other people  A simple answer is  don t do it

User · Answer

From http   git or cz gitwiki GitTips head-9f87cd21bcdf081a61c29985604ff4be35a5e6c0   How to change commits deeper in history Since history in Git is immutable  fixing anything but the most recent commit  commit which is not branch head  requires that the history is rewritten from the changed commit and forward  You can use StGIT for that  initialize branch if necessary  uncommitting up to the commit you want to change  pop to it if necessary  make a change then refresh patch  with -e option if you want to correct commit message   then push everything and stg commit  Or you can use rebase to do that  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   then rebase branch on top of changed commit  using git rebase --onto     Or you can use git rebase --interactive  which allows various modifications like patch re-ordering  collapsing       I think that should answer your question  However  note that if you have pushed code to a remote repository and people have pulled from it  then this is going to mess up their code histories  as well as the work they ve done  So do it carefully

User · Answer

Currently a git replace might do the trick   In detail  Create a temporary work branch   git checkout -b temp   Reset to the commit to replace  git reset --hard  lt sha1 gt    Amend the commit with the right message  git commit --amend -m   lt right message gt     Replace the old commit with the new one  git replace  lt old commit sha1 gt   lt new commit sha1 gt    go back to the branch where you were  git checkout  lt branch gt    remove temp branch  git branch -D temp   push  guess   done

User · Answer

Suppose you have a tree like this   dd2e86 - 946992 - 9143a9 - a6fd86 - 5a6057  master    First  checkout a temp branch   git checkout -b temp   On temp branch  reset --hard to a commit that you want to change its message  for example  that commit is 946992    git reset --hard 946992   Use amend to change the message   git commit --amend -m   lt new message gt     After that the tree will look like this   dd2e86 - 946992 - 9143a9 - a6fd86 - 5a6057  master                           b886a0  temp    Then  cherry-pick all the commit that is ahead of 946992 from master to temp and commit them  use amend if you want to change their messages as well   git cherry-pick 9143a9 git commit --amend -m   lt new message gt      git cherry-pick 5a6057 git commit --amend -m   lt new message gt    The tree now looks like this   dd2e86 - 946992 - 9143a9 - a6fd86 - 5a6057  master                                   b886a0 - 41ab2c - 6c2a3s - 7c88c9  temp    Now force push the temp branch to remote   git push --force origin temp master   The final step  delete branch master on local  git fetch origin to pull branch master from the server  then switch to branch master and delete branch temp   Now both your local and remote will have all the messages updated

User · Answer

At our shop  I introduced the convention of adding recognizably named annotated tags to commits with incorrect messages  and using the annotation as the replacement   Even though this doesn t help folks who run casual  git log  commands  it does provide us with a way to fix incorrect bug tracker references in the comments  and all my build and release tools understand the convention   This is obviously not a generic answer  but it might be something folks can adopt within specific communities  I m sure if this is used on a larger scale  some sort of porcelain support for it may crop up  eventually

User · Answer

From http   git or cz gitwiki GitTips head-9f87cd21bcdf081a61c29985604ff4be35a5e6c0   How to change commits deeper in history Since history in Git is immutable  fixing anything but the most recent commit  commit which is not branch head  requires that the history is rewritten from the changed commit and forward  You can use StGIT for that  initialize branch if necessary  uncommitting up to the commit you want to change  pop to it if necessary  make a change then refresh patch  with -e option if you want to correct commit message   then push everything and stg commit  Or you can use rebase to do that  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   then rebase branch on top of changed commit  using git rebase --onto     Or you can use git rebase --interactive  which allows various modifications like patch re-ordering  collapsing       I think that should answer your question  However  note that if you have pushed code to a remote repository and people have pulled from it  then this is going to mess up their code histories  as well as the work they ve done  So do it carefully

User · Answer

If you are using Git Extensions  go into the Commit screen  there should be a checkbox that says  Amend Commit  at the bottom  as can be seen below

User · Answer

Suppose you have a tree like this   dd2e86 - 946992 - 9143a9 - a6fd86 - 5a6057  master    First  checkout a temp branch   git checkout -b temp   On temp branch  reset --hard to a commit that you want to change its message  for example  that commit is 946992    git reset --hard 946992   Use amend to change the message   git commit --amend -m   lt new message gt     After that the tree will look like this   dd2e86 - 946992 - 9143a9 - a6fd86 - 5a6057  master                           b886a0  temp    Then  cherry-pick all the commit that is ahead of 946992 from master to temp and commit them  use amend if you want to change their messages as well   git cherry-pick 9143a9 git commit --amend -m   lt new message gt      git cherry-pick 5a6057 git commit --amend -m   lt new message gt    The tree now looks like this   dd2e86 - 946992 - 9143a9 - a6fd86 - 5a6057  master                                   b886a0 - 41ab2c - 6c2a3s - 7c88c9  temp    Now force push the temp branch to remote   git push --force origin temp master   The final step  delete branch master on local  git fetch origin to pull branch master from the server  then switch to branch master and delete branch temp   Now both your local and remote will have all the messages updated

User · Answer

You can use git rebase -i  against the branch you branched from   i  for interactive   Replace the pick next to the commit comment you wish to change with r  or reword   save and exit and upon doing so you ll be able to make the edit   git push once again and you re done

User · Answer

The message from Linus Torvalds may answer your question   Modify edit old commit messages  Short answer  you can not  if pushed      extract  Linus refers to BitKeeper as BK       Side note  just out of historical interest  in BK you could       And if you re used to it  like I was  it was really quite practical  I    would apply a patch-bomb from Andrew  notice something was wrong  and just    edit it before pushing it out       I could have done the same with git  It would have been easy enough to    make just the commit message not be part of the name  and still guarantee    that the history was untouched  and allow the  fix up comments later     thing       But I didn t       Part of it is purely  internal consistency   Git is simply a cleaner    system thanks to everything being SHA1-protected  and all objects being    treated the same  regardless of object type  Yeah  there are four    different kinds of objects  and they are all really different  and they    can t be used in the same way  but at the same time  even if their    encoding might be different on disk  conceptually they all work exactly    the same       But internal consistency isn t really an excuse for being inflexible  and    clearly it would be very flexible if we could just fix up mistakes after    they happen  So that s not a really strong argument       The real reason git doesn t allow you to change the commit message ends    up being very simple  that way  you can trust the messages  If you allowed    people to change them afterwards  the messages are inherently not very    trustworthy      To be complete  you could rewrite your local commit history in order to reflect what you want  as suggested by sykora  with some rebase and reset --hard  gasp    However  once you publish your revised history again  with a git push origin  master master  the   sign forcing the push to occur  even if it doesn t result in a  fast-forward  commit     you might get into some trouble   Extract from this other SO question      I actually once pushed with --force to git git repository and got scolded by Linus BIG TIME  It will create a lot of problems for other people  A simple answer is  don t do it

User · Answer

From http   git or cz gitwiki GitTips head-9f87cd21bcdf081a61c29985604ff4be35a5e6c0   How to change commits deeper in history Since history in Git is immutable  fixing anything but the most recent commit  commit which is not branch head  requires that the history is rewritten from the changed commit and forward  You can use StGIT for that  initialize branch if necessary  uncommitting up to the commit you want to change  pop to it if necessary  make a change then refresh patch  with -e option if you want to correct commit message   then push everything and stg commit  Or you can use rebase to do that  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   then rebase branch on top of changed commit  using git rebase --onto     Or you can use git rebase --interactive  which allows various modifications like patch re-ordering  collapsing       I think that should answer your question  However  note that if you have pushed code to a remote repository and people have pulled from it  then this is going to mess up their code histories  as well as the work they ve done  So do it carefully

User · Answer

The message from Linus Torvalds may answer your question   Modify edit old commit messages  Short answer  you can not  if pushed      extract  Linus refers to BitKeeper as BK       Side note  just out of historical interest  in BK you could       And if you re used to it  like I was  it was really quite practical  I    would apply a patch-bomb from Andrew  notice something was wrong  and just    edit it before pushing it out       I could have done the same with git  It would have been easy enough to    make just the commit message not be part of the name  and still guarantee    that the history was untouched  and allow the  fix up comments later     thing       But I didn t       Part of it is purely  internal consistency   Git is simply a cleaner    system thanks to everything being SHA1-protected  and all objects being    treated the same  regardless of object type  Yeah  there are four    different kinds of objects  and they are all really different  and they    can t be used in the same way  but at the same time  even if their    encoding might be different on disk  conceptually they all work exactly    the same       But internal consistency isn t really an excuse for being inflexible  and    clearly it would be very flexible if we could just fix up mistakes after    they happen  So that s not a really strong argument       The real reason git doesn t allow you to change the commit message ends    up being very simple  that way  you can trust the messages  If you allowed    people to change them afterwards  the messages are inherently not very    trustworthy      To be complete  you could rewrite your local commit history in order to reflect what you want  as suggested by sykora  with some rebase and reset --hard  gasp    However  once you publish your revised history again  with a git push origin  master master  the   sign forcing the push to occur  even if it doesn t result in a  fast-forward  commit     you might get into some trouble   Extract from this other SO question      I actually once pushed with --force to git git repository and got scolded by Linus BIG TIME  It will create a lot of problems for other people  A simple answer is  don t do it

User · Answer

From http   git or cz gitwiki GitTips head-9f87cd21bcdf081a61c29985604ff4be35a5e6c0   How to change commits deeper in history Since history in Git is immutable  fixing anything but the most recent commit  commit which is not branch head  requires that the history is rewritten from the changed commit and forward  You can use StGIT for that  initialize branch if necessary  uncommitting up to the commit you want to change  pop to it if necessary  make a change then refresh patch  with -e option if you want to correct commit message   then push everything and stg commit  Or you can use rebase to do that  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   then rebase branch on top of changed commit  using git rebase --onto     Or you can use git rebase --interactive  which allows various modifications like patch re-ordering  collapsing       I think that should answer your question  However  note that if you have pushed code to a remote repository and people have pulled from it  then this is going to mess up their code histories  as well as the work they ve done  So do it carefully

[git] How do I edit an incorrect commit message in git ( that I've pushed )?

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