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I wrote the wrong thing in a commit message. Alternatively, I've forgotten to include some files.

How can I change the commit message/files? The commit has not been pushed yet.

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will open your editor, allowing you to change the commit message of the most recent commit. Additionally, you can set the commit message directly in the command line with:

…however, this can make multi-line commit messages or small corrections more cumbersome to enter.

Make sure you don't have any working copy changes staged before doing this or they will get committed too. (Unstaged changes will not get committed.)

If you've already pushed your commit up to your remote branch, then you'll need to force push the commit with:

Warning: force-pushing will overwrite the remote branch with the state of your local one. If there are commits on the remote branch that you don't have in your local branch, you will lose those commits.

Warning: be cautious about amending commits that you have already shared with other people. Amending commits essentially rewrites them to have different SHA IDs, which poses a problem if other people have copies of the old commit that you've rewritten. Anyone who has a copy of the old commit will need to synchronize their work with your newly re-written commit, which can sometimes be difficult, so make sure you coordinate with others when attempting to rewrite shared commit history, or just avoid rewriting shared commits altogether.

Another option is to use interactive rebase.
This allows you to edit any message you want to update even if it's not the latest message.

In order to do a git squash, follow these steps:

Once you squash your commits - choose the e/r for editing the message

When you use the git rebase -i HEAD~X there can be more than X commits. Git will "collect" all the commits in the last X commits and if there was a merge somewhere in between that range you will see all the commits as well so the outcome will be X+.

If you have to do it for more than a single branch and you might face conflicts when amending the content, set up git rerere and let git resolve those conflicts automatically for you.

git-commit(1) Manual Page

git-rebase(1) Manual Page

git-push(1) Manual Page

If the commit you want to fix isn’t the most recent one:

git rebase --interactive $parent_of_flawed_commit

If you want to fix several flawed commits, pass the parent of the oldest one of them.

An editor will come up, with a list of all commits since the one you gave.

For each commit you want to reword, Git will drop you back into your editor. For each commit you want to edit, Git drops you into the shell. If you’re in the shell:

Most of this sequence will be explained to you by the output of the various commands as you go. It’s very easy, you don’t need to memorise it – just remember that git rebase --interactive lets you correct commits no matter how long ago they were.

Note that you will not want to change commits that you have already pushed. Or maybe you do, but in that case you will have to take great care to communicate with everyone who may have pulled your commits and done work on top of them. How do I recover/resynchronise after someone pushes a rebase or a reset to a published branch?

To amend the previous commit, make the changes you want and stage those changes, and then run

This will open a file in your text editor representing your new commit message. It starts out populated with the text from your old commit message. Change the commit message as you want, then save the file and quit your editor to finish.

To amend the previous commit and keep the same log message, run

To fix the previous commit by removing it entirely, run

If you want to edit more than one commit message, run

(Replace commit_count with number of commits that you want to edit.) This command launches your editor. Mark the first commit (the one that you want to change) as “edit” instead of “pick”, then save and exit your editor. Make the change you want to commit and then run

Note: You can "Make the change you want" also from the editor opened by git commit --amend

As already mentioned, git commit --amend is the way to overwrite the last commit. One note: if you would like to also overwrite the files, the command would be

You also can use git filter-branch for that.

It's not as easy as a trivial git commit --amend, but it's especially useful, if you already have some merges after your erroneous commit message.

Note that this will try to rewrite EVERY commit between HEAD and the flawed commit, so you should choose your msg-filter command very wise ;-)

I prefer this way.

Otherwise, there will be a new commit with a new commit ID

If you are using the Git GUI tool, there is a button named amend last commit. Click on that button and then it will display your last commit files and message. Just edit that message and you can commit it with new commit message.

Or use this command from a console/terminal:

You can use Git rebasing. For example, if you want to modify back to commit bbc643cd, run

In the default editor, modify 'pick' to 'edit' in the line whose commit you want to modify. Make your changes and then stage them with

Now you can use

to modify the commit, and after that

to return back to the previous head commit.

If you only want to modify your last commit message, then do:

That will drop you into your text exitor and let you change the last commit message.

If you want to change the last 3 commit messages, or any of the commit messages up to that point, supply HEAD~3 to the git rebase -i command:

If you have to change an old commit message over multiple branches (i.e., the commit with the erroneous message is present in multiple branches) you might want to use:

Git will create a temporary directory for rewriting and additionally backup old references in refs/original/.

-f will enforce the execution of the operation. This is necessary if the the temporary directory is already present or if there are already references stored under refs/original. If that is not the case, you can drop this flag.

-- separates filter-branch options from revision options.

--all will make sure, that all branches and tags are rewritten.

Due to the backup of your old references, you can easily go back to the state before executing the command.

Say, you want to recover your master and access it in branch old_master:

Use

To understand it in detail, an excellent post is 4. Rewriting Git History. It also talks about when not to use git commit --amend.

You have a couple of options here. You can do

as long as it's your last commit.

Otherwise if it's not your last commit you can do an interactive rebase,

Then inside the interactive rebase you simply add edit to that commit. When it comes up do a git commit --amend and modify the commit message. If you want to roll back before that commit point you could also use git reflog and just delete that commit. Then you just do a git commit again.

If you are using the Git GUI, you can amend the last commit which hasn't been pushed with:

If it's your last commit, just amend the commit:

(using the -o (--only) flag to make sure you change only the commit message)

If it's a buried commit, use the awesome interactive rebase:

Find the commit you want, change pick to r (reword), and save and close the file. Done!

Miniature vim tutorial (or, how to rebase with only 8 keystrokes 3jcwrEscZZ):

If you edit text a lot, then switch to the Dvorak keyboard layout, learn to touch-type, and learn vim. Is it worth the effort? Yes.

ProTip™:   Don't be afraid to experiment with "dangerous" commands that rewrite history* — Git doesn't delete your commits for 90 days by default; you can find them in the reflog:

* Watch out for options like --hard and --force though — they can discard data.
* Also, don't rewrite history on any branches you're collaborating on.

I use the Git GUI as much as I can, and that gives you the option to amend the last commit:

Also, git rebase -i origin/masteris a nice mantra that will always present you with the commits you have done on top of master, and give you the option to amend, delete, reorder or squash. No need to get hold of that hash first.

Wow, so there are a lot of ways to do this.

Yet another way to do this is to delete the last commit, but keep its changes so that you won't lose your work. You can then do another commit with the corrected message. This would look something like this:

I always do this if I forget to add a file or do a change.

Remember to specify --soft instead of --hard, otherwise you lose that commit entirely.

If you just want to edit the latest commit use:

or

But if you want to edit several commits in a row you should use rebasing instead:

In a file like the one above write edit/e or one of the other option and hit save and exit.

Now you'll be at the first wrong commit. Make changes in the files, and they'll be automatically staged for you. Type

save and exit that and type

to move to next selection until finished with all your selections.

Note that these things change all your SHA hashes after that particular commit.

If you only want to change your last message you should use the --only flag or its shortcut -o with commit --amend:

This ensures that you don't accidentally enhance your commit with staged stuff. Of course it's best to have a proper $EDITOR configuration. Then you can leave the -m option out, and git will pre-fill the commit message with the old one. In this way it can be easily edited.

For anyone looking for a Windows/Mac GUI to help with editing older messages (i.e. not just the latest message), I'd recommend SourceTree. The steps to follow are below.

For commits that haven't yet been pushed to a remote:

...Or... for commits that have already been pushed:

Follow the steps in this answer, which are similar to above but require a further command to be run from the command line to force-push the branch - read it all and apply the necessary caution!

Update your last wrong commit message with new commit message in one line:

Or, try git reset like below:

git reset can help you to break one commit into multiple commits too:

Here you have successfully broke your last commit into two commits.

On this question there are a lot of answers but none of them explains in super detail how to change older commit messages using VIM. I was stuck trying to do this myself, so here I'll write down in detail how I did this especially for people who have no experience in VIM!

I wanted to change my five latest commits that I already pushed to the server. This is quite 'dangerous' cause if someone else already pulled from this you can mess things up by changing the commit messages. However when you’re working on your own little branch and are sure no one pulled it you can change it like this:

Let's say you want to change your five latest commits, then you type this in the terminal:

git rebase -i HEAD~5
*Where 5 is the number of commit messages you want to change. (so if you want to change the 10th to last commit you type in 10)

This command will get you into VIM there you can ‘edit’ your commit history.
You’ll see your last 5 commits at the top like this:

pick <commit hash> commit message

Instead of pick you need to write reword. You can do this in VIM by typing in i, that makes you go in to INSERT-mode. (You see that you’re in insert mode by the word INSERT at the bottom) For the commits you want to change type in reword instead of pick

Then you need to save and quit this screen, you do that by first going in to ‘command-mode’ by pressing the esc button. (you can check that you’re in command-mode if the word INSERT at the bottom has disappeared) Then you can type in a command by typing :, the command to save and quit is wq. So if you type in :wq you’re ont he right track.

Then VIM wil go over every commit message you want to reword, here you can actually change the commit messages. You’ll do this by going into INSERT-mode, changing the commit message, going into the command-mode and save and quit. Do this 5 times and you’re out of VIM!

Then, if you already pushed your wrong commits, you need to git push --force to overwrite them. Remember that git push --force is quite a dangerous thing to do, so make sure that no-one pulled from the server since you pushed your wrong commits!

Now you have changed your commit messages!

(As you see I'm not that experienced in VIM so if I used wrong 'lingo' to explain what's happening, feel free to correct me!)

I have added the alias of reci, recm for recommit (amend) it, now I can do it with git recm or git recm -m .

You can use git-rebase-reword

It is designed to edit any commit (not just last) same way as commit --amend

It is named after the action on rebase interactive to amend a commit: "reword". See this post and man -section interactive mode-

Examples:

I realised that I had pushed a commit with a typo in it. In order to undo, I did the following:

Warning: force pushing your changes will overwrite the remote branch with your local one. Make sure that you aren't going to be overwriting anything that you want to keep. Also be cautious about force pushing an amended (rewritten) commit if anyone else shares the branch with you, because they'll need to rewrite their own history if they have the old copy of the commit that you've just rewritten.

I like to use the following:

If you have not pushed the code to your remote branch (GitHub/Bitbucket) you can change the commit message on the command line as below.

If you're working on a specific branch do this:

If you've already pushed the code with the wrong message, and you need to be careful when changing the message. That is, after you change the commit message and try pushing it again, you end up with having issues. To make it smooth, follow these steps.

Please read my entire answer before doing it.

Important note: When you use the force push directly you might end up with code issues that other developers are working on the same branch. So to avoid those conflicts, you need to pull the code from your branch before making the force push:

This is the best practice when changing the commit message, if it was already pushed.

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