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
    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...

  • 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
    MooTools Typewriter Effect Plugin

    Last week, I read an article in which the author created a typewriter effect using the jQuery JavaScript framework. I was impressed with the idea and execution of the code so I decided to port the effect to MooTools. After about an hour of coding...

  • By
    Create a NoScript Compatible Select Form Element with an onChange Event

    I wouldn't say that I'm addicted to checking Google Analytics but I do check my statistics often. I guess hoping for a huge burst of traffic from some unknown source. Anyway, I have multiple sites set up within my account. The way to...

Discussion

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