Change the author and committer of a Git commit

The following command sets both the author and committer to a custom specified name and email address when creating a commit.

GIT_COMMITTER_NAME="Jane Doe" GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL="jane@example.com" git commit --author="Jane Doe <jane@example.com>" -m "Do something"

In Git, there’s a distinction between the author and the committer of a commit. An author is the person who created the change while a committer is the person who applied that change.

For regular commits, this difference usually is non-existent and the same person, which is why the same name and email address is used above.

In real life, you would/should use your own name and email address for the committer role as you’re the person that persists/applies the work of someone else.

In case you need to do this quite often, it may make sense to create a shell function (e.g. in ~/.zshrc or ~/.bash_profile) which eases running the command a bit.

function commitas {
  export GIT_COMMITTER_NAME=$1
  export GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL=$2
  git commit --author="$GIT_COMMITTER_NAME <$GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL>" -m $3
}

Now you can simply run commitas "Jane Doe" "jane@example.com" "Do something".

Git