Git Update Commit Message

By  on  

One of my faults as a professional developer is that my commit messages aren't always as descriptive as they could be.  Sometimes I even notice a spelling error in them.  Bleh -- that's not cool, man.  When I do catch that my last commit message isn't good enough, I find the following git command useful:

The command below rewrites the message for the previous commit.  You can omit the -m and message to go into the commit shell instead.

git commit --amend -m "This is the new message"

Do realize, however, that performing this after you've pushed to a remote repo is considered bad as it rewrites history. If you haven't pushed, however, the command above is gold!

Recent Features

  • By
    Chris Coyier’s Favorite CodePen Demos

    David asked me if I'd be up for a guest post picking out some of my favorite Pens from CodePen. A daunting task! There are so many! I managed to pick a few though that have blown me away over the past few months. If you...

  • By
    CSS @supports

    Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn't been available within CSS.  What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix.  Yuck.  Another thing we...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Redacted Font

    Back when I created client websites, one of the many things that frustrated me was the initial design handoff.  It would always go like this: Work hard to incorporate client's ideas, dream up awesome design. Create said design, using Lorem Ipsum text Send initial design concept to the client...

  • By
    MooTools PulseFade Plugin

    I was recently driven to create a MooTools plugin that would take an element and fade it to a min from a max for a given number of times. Here's the result of my Moo-foolery. The MooTools JavaScript Options of the class include: min: (defaults to .5) the...

Discussion

  1. This is one of the things I do more frequently :-/

    The good thing is that, with amend, you can also include in the commit new changes (provided that you have added them to the staging area).

    The drawback is that it’s **bad** to amend a commit that has already been pushed to a remote repository.

  2. May I point you to an article of my own, in which I describe some more solutions on how to change commit messages:

    http://www.gamez.name/change-commit-message-git/

  3. Dorian Marchal

    Be careful, this command rewrites history and shouldn’t be used if you already pushed your last commit.

  4. And you are noticing it now? :D

    One thing to remember is HASH is changed on amending.

  5. And you are noticing it now? :D

    Well, one thing to notice is that HASH of that particular commit is rewritten when amending.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!