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Co-authoring Git commits

Cassidy Williams on August 27, 2023

Sometimes when I'm pair programming (or if someone's been just super helpful to me), I want to be able to give another developer credit in a commit...
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Vesa Laakso •

This is neat! I am myself using the fancy --trailer flag that git commit also provides to do the same:

git commit -m "The commit message" --trailer 'Co-authored-by: name <person@example.com>'
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I have even saved this to a git alias when I'm pair-programming more often so that I get the trailer appended automatically. For example:

git config --global alias.commit-jane "commit --trailer 'Co-authored-by: Jane Doe <jane.doe@example.com>'"
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Now git commit-jane allows me to commit with Jane in Co-authored-by :)

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Oana Munteanu •

Ah this is so cool! I'm totally saving this in my gist files. thanks for sharing this!

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Visakh Vijayan •

nice. Appreicating is fulfilling

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Samar F. Jaffri •

Woa! This would be a great way of showing them that their time and effort is valued.
Thanks for sharing Cassidy!

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Chirag Aggarwal •

Github did this automatically when you commit a suggestion directly. Never know how to do this in command line. Really informative post ⭐️

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Alba Rincón • • Edited

Nice! 👏
I wrote a similar one some time ago, but to use it alongside git mob, which is a cool tool for pairing!
dev.to/albarin/how-to-easily-add-c...

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Oana Munteanu •

ah I feel so bad that I didn't know about this until now and so happy that now I know this. Thanks for sharing this Cassidy! <3

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Grady Salzman •

This is really great, thanks for sharing how to do this! That Grady guy also seems really cool.

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Cassidy Williams •

And sooooo smart

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Brice • • Edited

There is also more commit msg keywords convention.. for example :

Closes: $BUGNUMBER
Reviewed-by:
Suggested-by:
Tested-by:
Thanks: msg
(...)
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Cf. Src old wiki, and git trailer SO post

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Jake Nelson •

Can you do this trailer action on an amend? Is it just containing that other email in the required format within the commit body message that does this or is it some kind of annotation?

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Vesa Laakso •

Yeah I think you can do a

git commit --amend --trailer 'Co-authored-by: name <person@example.com>'
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to get what you want.

And couple that with --reuse-message=HEAD to only add the trailer to the most recent commit and not even trigger an editor to open up:

git commit --amend --trailer 'Co-authored-by: name <person@example.com>' --reuse-message=HEAD
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