11.5.4. How to modify existing, unpushed commits
Best answer on Stack Overflow is: git - How to modify existing, unpushed commits?:
Question:
I wrote the wrong thing in a commit message. Alternatively, I’ve
forgotten to include some files.
How can I change the commit message/files? The commit has not been
pushed yet.
Amending the most recent commit message
will open your editor, allowing you to change the commit message of the most
recent commit. Additionally, you can set the commit message directly in the
command line with:
git commit --amend -m "New commit message"
However, this can make multi-line commit messages or small corrections more
cumbersome to enter.
Make sure you don’t have any working copy changes staged before doing this
or they will get committed too. (Unstaged changes will not get committed.)
Changing the message of a commit that you’ve already pushed to your remote
branch
If you’ve already pushed your commit up to your remote branch, then you’ll
need to force push the commit with:
git push <remote> <branch> --force
# Or
git push <remote> <branch> -f
Warning: force-pushing will overwrite the remote branch with the state of
your local one. If there are commits on the remote branch that you don’t
have in your local branch, you will lose those commits.
Warning: be cautious about amending commits that you have already shared
with other people. Amending commits essentially rewrites them to have
different SHA IDs, which poses a problem if other people have copies of the
old commit that you’ve rewritten. Anyone who has a copy of the old commit
will need to synchronize their work with your newly re-written commit, which
can sometimes be difficult, so make sure you coordinate with others when
attempting to rewrite shared commit history, or just avoid rewriting shared
commits altogether.
Use interactive rebase
Another option is to use interactive rebase.
This allows you to edit any message you want to update even if it’s not the
latest message.
In order to do a git squash, follow these steps:
# X is the number of commits to the last commit you want to be able to edit
git rebase -i HEAD~X
Once you squash your commits - choose the e/r for editing the message
Here is an automatic rebase for the dates
Change both author and commiter dates:
date="Mon Mar 17 12:08:55 2025 +0100"; LANG= GIT_COMMITTER_DATE="${date}" git commit --amend --no-edit --date "${date}"
git rebase HEAD~3 --exec 'date="Mon Mar 17 12:08:55 2025 +0100"; LANG= GIT_COMMITTER_DATE="${date}" git commit --amend --no-edit --date "${date}"'
Check the dates with:
Important note about Interactive rebase
When you use the git rebase -i HEAD~X there can be more than X commits. Git
will “collect” all the commits in the last X commits and if there was a
merge somewhere in between that range you will see all the commits as well
so the outcome will be X+.
Good tip:
If you have to do it for more than a single branch and you might face
conflicts when amending the content set up the git rerere and let git
resolve those conflicts automatically for you.