How to change the author name and email in Git?

To change the author name and email associated with your commits in Git, you can use the git commit --amend command with the --author flag. This will allow you to modify the author information for the most recent commit.

Here is the basic syntax for the git commit --amend command:

git commit --amend --author="Author Name <[email protected]>"

Keep in mind that this will only change the author information for the most recent commit. If you want to change the author information for older commits, you will need to use a different approach.

One way to change the author information for older commits is to use the git filter-branch command. This command allows you to rewrite Git history by applying filters to each commit in a branch. You can use the --env-filter option to modify the environment variables used by Git when creating each commit, including the GIT_AUTHOR_NAME and GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL variables that control the author name and email.

Here is an example of how you can use the git filter-branch command to change the author name and email for all commits in a branch:

git filter-branch --env-filter '
OLD_EMAIL="[email protected]"
CORRECT_NAME="Correct Name"
CORRECT_EMAIL="[email protected]"
if [ "$GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL" = "$OLD_EMAIL" ]
then
    export GIT_COMMITTER_NAME="$CORRECT_NAME"
    export GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL="$CORRECT_EMAIL"
fi
if [ "$GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL" = "$OLD_EMAIL" ]
then
    export GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="$CORRECT_NAME"
    export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="$CORRECT_EMAIL"
fi
' --tag-name-filter cat -- --branches --tags

This command will rewrite the commit history of all branches and tags, replacing the old author email with the new one and updating the author name as well. Keep in mind that this operation can be time-consuming and may result in a large number of new commits, so use it with caution.