Recently, I needed to change the email address on all commits in most of my personal git repos.
Searching on the web, there are a few methods of doing this, most
involving git rebase. There are also some that use
git-filter-branch.
Interestingly, applying git-filter-branch puts out a
warning/recommendarion to use git-filter-repo instead, which is what
I ended up doing in the end.
Important to note, that all of these methods will rewrite the whole commit history, and change all the hashes. Since, I am the sole committer here, I wasn’t too much concered about that. Needless to say, take backups!
Installation
git-filter-repo is not included in a standard git package. It is
available on most Linux distributions though.
# Arch Linux
pacman -S git-filter-repo
# OpenSUSE
zypper install git-filter-repo
Procedure
Before doing anything, taking a full backup of the repo is a must!
# clone a temporary fresh bare repository
git clone --bare <repo>
# change the email and name on all commits
git filter-repo \
--email-callback 'return b"test@example.com"' \
--name-callback 'return b"testname"'
# push with force
git push --force
# remove temporary repo
rm -rf <repo>
# clone the fixed repo
git clone <repo>