Rewrite author/committer history of a git repository

Have you ever accidentally committed to a git repository with a broken user config? No? But your co-workers have?

So, you're stuck with commits like this:

Author: root <root@localhost>

    Hotfix on the production server.  This was urgent!

Nasty. Or:

Author: John Doe <john@localhost>

    Fixed bug #1.  Committed on my laptop.

Would it be nice to rewrite history? And take care of committers, as well as of authors? Without all the hassle? Now, you can!

Usage:

$ git rewrite-author -w "John Doe <john@localhost>" "John Doe <[email protected]>"

Then, to push your changes to the default remote:

$ git push --force

Not using --force may duplicate the commits on origin, not replace them, so be careful with that.

You're not sure which authors/committers are hidden in your repository? What about:

$ git rewrite-author -l

Tags are rewritten automagically, too!

After you've checked everything is okay, you may wish to remove the original refs backed up by git --filter-branch:

$ git for-each-ref --format="%(refname)" refs/original/ | xargs -r -n 1 git update-ref -d

Enjoy!

Installation

Clone or download this repository and run:

$ python setup.py install