How to Set Commit Author

By  on  

I've worn dozens of hats on a dozen different teams during my time at Mozilla, but none has been as rewarding and challenging as community management. Whether it's mentoring students, welcoming new contributors, or reviewing pull requests, there's always so much to be done. There's also the rare occasion where I need to submit a patch for a contributor.

Since I work with both git and mercurial (hg), I've needed to learn how to set commit author in each version control system.

To set the commit author with git, you would execute:

git commit --author="User Name <username@domain.com>" -m "The commit message"

To set the commit author with mercurial, you would execute:

hg commit -u "User Name <username@domain.com>" -m "The commit message"

Giving community members credit for their patches is the ultimate sign of respect, so in the case you need to translate those patches for a contributor, these snippets are gold. Help them help you!

Recent Features

  • By
    5 Ways that CSS and JavaScript Interact That You May Not Know About

    CSS and JavaScript:  the lines seemingly get blurred by each browser release.  They have always done a very different job but in the end they are both front-end technologies so they need do need to work closely.  We have our .js files and our .css, but...

  • By
    9 Mind-Blowing Canvas Demos

    The <canvas> element has been a revelation for the visual experts among our ranks.  Canvas provides the means for incredible and efficient animations with the added bonus of no Flash; these developers can flash their awesome JavaScript skills instead.  Here are nine unbelievable canvas demos that...

Incredible Demos

Discussion

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