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

by

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”.

More Related Contents:

  1. How do I make git use the editor of my choice for commits?
  2. How do I make git use the editor of my choice for editing commit messages?
  3. How do I prompt the user from within a commit-msg hook?
  4. Print commit message of a given commit in git
  5. Remove sensitive files and their commits from Git history
  6. Can I ‘git commit’ a file and ignore its content changes?
  7. After $git push -u origin main command, Git bash is not requesting any authentication literally does nothing
  8. How to remove files that are listed in the .gitignore but still on the repository?
  9. Git – Ignore node_modules folder everywhere
  10. In Git, how can I write the current commit hash to a file in the same commit
  11. Why am I getting the message, “fatal: This operation must be run in a work tree?”
  12. Git workflow – Setting up a build process
  13. What are some more forceful ways than a .gitignore to keep (force) files out of a repository?
  14. Can a Git hook automatically add files to the commit?
  15. git – cherry-pick – HOWTO / WHYTO
  16. Making Git retain different section content between branches
  17. How to push a local Git repository to another computer?
  18. .ssh/config file for windows (git)
  19. git commit frequency
  20. How does git handle folder permission?
  21. How to rebase one Git repository onto another one?
  22. How do I change case of the names of multiple files, already committed?
  23. Is there a way to limit the amount of memory that “git gc” uses?
  24. Git submodules and ssh access
  25. How to check if remote branch exists on a given remote repository?
  26. How to list files ignored with ‘skip-worktree’
  27. Calling ‘git pull’ from a git post-update hook
  28. How do I show my global Git configuration?
  29. Why does ‘git commit’ not save my changes?
  30. Viewing full version tree in git

Leave a Comment