Editing Time for Past Commit Messages ¹

Okay, so sometimes we don't always work on time, and we pretend to do the work right 😅. Knowing that you can do the work on time, but need to show proof that you did it in the past, found this way to edit the commit time on your commit history.

Reference to the answer from StackOverflow ²

For now, the flow I'm following is this:

• Write code or specific piece of progress (don't commit everything together in a single commit)
• Stage and commit as usual.
• Use this command to edit the latest commits time -

  GIT_COMMITTER_DATE="Mon Apr 22 9:40 2024 +0530" git commit --amend --date "Mon Apr 22 9:40 2024 +0530" --no-edit
  

• For proper date formats refer to this article - https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-commit.html#_date_formats

The GIT_AUTHOR_DATE and GIT_COMMITTER_DATE environment variables support the following date formats:

Git internal format

It is unix-timestamp time-zone-offset, where unix-timestamp is the number of seconds since the UNIX epoch. time-zone-offset is a positive or negative offset from UTC. For example CET (which is 1 hour ahead of UTC) is +0100.

RFC 2822

The standard date format as described by RFC 2822, for example Thu, 07 Apr 2005 22:13:13 +0200.

ISO 8601

Time and date specified by the ISO 8601 standard, for example 2005-04-07T22:13:13. The parser accepts a space instead of the T character as well. Fractional parts of a second will be ignored, for example 2005-04-07T22:13:13.019 will be treated as 2005-04-07T22:13:13.

Note

In addition, the date part is accepted in the following formats: YYYY.MM.DD, MM/DD/YYYY and DD.MM.YYYY. In addition to recognizing all date formats above, the --date option will also try to make sense of other, more human-centric date formats, such as relative dates like "yesterday" or "last Friday at noon".

With the mentioned command, I've set the committer date in the start and the author-date as the same on the date flag.

Here's a simple explanation of the two dates involved during a commit - GIT_AUTHOR_DATE and GIT_COMMITTER_DATE are environment variables in Git that store the date and time of a commit. The author date is the date and time that the changes were originally written, while the committer date is the date and time that the changes were committed to the repository.

Author date will always be the same date when you make the commit and it's usually the same as the commit date, however when there's some changes like merging / rebasing and amends, the commit date will be different from the author date. ³

Footnotes

1. Question Reference: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/454734/how-can-one-change-the-timestamp-of-an-old-commit-in-git ↩

2. Answer for the same: https://stackoverflow.com/a/32733750/14187429 ↩

3. Simple explanation on author and commit dates: https://stackoverflow.com/a/11857467/14187429 ↩