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
    5 Awesome New Mozilla Technologies You’ve Never Heard Of

    My trip to Mozilla Summit 2013 was incredible.  I've spent so much time focusing on my project that I had lost sight of all of the great work Mozillians were putting out.  MozSummit provided the perfect reminder of how brilliant my colleagues are and how much...

  • By
    fetch API

    One of the worst kept secrets about AJAX on the web is that the underlying API for it, XMLHttpRequest, wasn't really made for what we've been using it for.  We've done well to create elegant APIs around XHR but we know we can do better.  Our effort to...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Animated AJAX Record Deletion Using Dojo

    I'm a huge fan of WordPress' method of individual article deletion. You click the delete link, the menu item animates red, and the item disappears. Here's how to achieve that functionality with Dojo JavaScript. The PHP - Content & Header The following snippet goes at the...

  • By
    Style Textarea Resizers

    Modern browsers are nice in that they allow you to style some odd properties.  Heck, one of the most popular posts on this blog is HTML5 Placeholder Styling with CSS, a tiny but useful task.  Did you know you can also restyle the textarea resizer in WebKit...

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!