How to amend several commits in Git to change author

Question

I have made a series of commits in Git and I realise now that I forgot to set my user name and user email properties correctly (new machine). I have not yet pushed these co

Answer 1

This method was documented by GitHub for this very purpose (though GitHub has since removed it). The steps are:

1. Open the terminal and make a bare clone of your repo

git clone --bare https://github.com/user/repo.git
cd repo

2. Edit the following script (replacing OLD_EMAIL, CORRECT_EMAIL, and CORRECT_NAME)

#!/bin/sh

git filter-branch --env-filter '
OLD_EMAIL="your-old-email@example.com"
CORRECT_NAME="Your Correct Name"
CORRECT_EMAIL="your-correct-email@example.com"
if [ "$GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL" = "$OLD_EMAIL" ]
then
    export GIT_COMMITTER_NAME="$CORRECT_NAME"
    export GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL="$CORRECT_EMAIL"
fi
if [ "$GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL" = "$OLD_EMAIL" ]
then
    export GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="$CORRECT_NAME"
    export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="$CORRECT_EMAIL"
fi
' --tag-name-filter cat -- --branches --tags

3. Copy/paste the script into your terminal and press enter to run it.
4. Push your changes with git push --force --tags origin 'refs/heads/*' and you're done!