How to change the author and committer name and e-mail of multiple commits in Git?

Question

I was writing a simple script in the school computer, and committing the changes to Git (in a repo that was in my pendrive, cloned from my computer at home). After several c

Answer 1

We have experienced an issue today where a UTF8 character in an author name was causing trouble on the build server, so we had to rewrite the history to correct this. The steps taken were:

Step 1: Change your username in git for all future commits, as per instructions here: https://help.github.com/articles/setting-your-username-in-git/

Step 2: Run the following bash script:

#!/bin/sh

REPO_URL=ssh://path/to/your.git
REPO_DIR=rewrite.tmp

# Clone the repository
git clone ${REPO_URL} ${REPO_DIR}

# Change to the cloned repository
cd ${REPO_DIR}

# Checkout all the remote branches as local tracking branches
git branch --list -r origin/* | cut -c10- | xargs -n1 git checkout

# Rewrite the history, use a system that will preseve the eol (or lack of in commit messages) - preferably Linux not OSX
git filter-branch --env-filter '
OLD_EMAIL="me@something.com"
CORRECT_NAME="New Me"

if [ "$GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL" = "$OLD_EMAIL" ]
then
    export GIT_COMMITTER_NAME="$CORRECT_NAME"
fi
if [ "$GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL" = "$OLD_EMAIL" ]
then
    export GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="$CORRECT_NAME"
fi
' --tag-name-filter cat -- --branches --tags

# Force push the rewritten branches + tags to the remote
git push -f

# Remove all knowledge that we did something
rm -rf ${REPO_DIR}

# Tell your colleagues to `git pull --rebase` on all their local remote tracking branches

Quick overview: Checkout your repository to a temp file, checkout all the remote branches, run the script which will rewrite the history, do a force push of the new state, and tell all your colleagues to do a rebase pull to get the changes.

We had trouble with running this on OS X because it somehow messed up line endings in commit messages, so we had to re-run it on a Linux machine afterwards.