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Hugo Di Francesco
Hugo Di Francesco

Posted on • Originally published at codewithhugo.com on

Change the date of a git commit

One of the greatest and worst things with git is that you can rewrite the history. Here’s a sneaky way of abusing that, I can’t think of a legitimate reason to do this.

As with anything, thanks StackOverflow for all the options I can pick from 👍.

Set the date of the last commit to the current date

GIT_COMMITTER_DATE="$(date)" git commit --amend --no-edit --date "$(date)"
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Set the date of the last commit to an arbitrary date

GIT_COMMITTER_DATE="Mon 20 Aug 2018 20:19:19 BST" git commit --amend --no-edit --date "Mon 20 Aug 2018 20:19:19 BST"
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Set the date of an arbitrary commit to an arbitrary or current date

Rebase to before said commit and stop for amendment:

  1. git rebase <commit-hash>^ -i
  2. Replace pick with e (edit) on the line with that commit (the first one)
  3. quit the editor (ESC followed by :wq in VIM)
  4. Either:
    • GIT_COMMITTER_DATE="$(date)" git commit --amend --no-edit --date "$(date)"
    • GIT_COMMITTER_DATE="Mon 20 Aug 2018 20:19:19 BST" git commit --amend --no-edit --date "Mon 20 Aug 2018 20:19:19 BST"

See here for more information around rebasing and editing in git: Split an existing git commit.

Sean Mungur

Latest comments (1)

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Szymon Przedwojski

Thanks, it worked.
As for a use case, I just had 4 commits that I rebased and squashed together. The resulting final commit had the date of the first of the 4 commits, which was a week ago.
And I wanted to push the final commit with today's date, which is a legitimate reason to me ;)