Summary
I rewrote the history of one of my Git repositories for security reason last year.
This post is about how I did, referring to the official documentation.
Besides, if it had been a public repository shared with or used by several people, I should have considered more about how to do, especially in communication.
Description
The primary command is below. Well, <*-username>
and <*-user@e.mail>
are due to environment.
# bash
git filter-branch --commit-filter '
if [ "$GIT_AUTHOR_NAME" != "<old-username>" ] || [ "$GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL" != "<old-user@e.mail>" ];
then
GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="<new-username>";
GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="<new-user@e.mail>";
git commit-tree "$@";
else
git commit-tree "$@";
fi' HEAD
It is Git's filter-branch
action, a module to "rewrite branches", with --commit-filter <command>
filter "for performing the commit", targeting HEAD
.
It detects history lines whose username or email isn't valid and rewrites them. Well, of course, you can change the if
condition and so on in it.
Then I pushed the rewritten history to hosting service (which was Gitea) I used.
$ git push --force origin main
Here, --force
or -f
option is necessary for the original lines not to be duplicated. Besides, If they were duplicated unfortunately, you might have to run git reset --hard HEAD^
and then git push --force origin HEAD
in order to delete all of the duplicated by restoring the previous commit.