What if you commit a change to your remote repository only to realize later that you have a typo in the commit message or you forgot to add a line in your most recent commit. How do you edit that? This is what this tutorial covers.
To do this without opening a file:
- Type in the
git commit --amend -m "followed by your new commit message" - Run
git push origin <branch-name>to commit the changes to the repository.
Note: If you type in just git commit --amend, your text editor would open up prompting you to edit the commit message.
Adding the -m flags prevents it.
So, what if we forgot to make a minor change to a file like changing a single word and we have already pushed the commit to our remote repository?
To illustrate here is a log of my commits:
g56123f create file bot file
a2235d updated contributor.md
a5da0d modified bot file
Let's say I forgot to add a single word to the bot file
There are 2 ways to go about this. The first is to have an entirely new commit that contains the change like so:
g56123f create file botfile
a2235d updated contributor.md
a5da0d modified botfile
b0ca8f added single word to botfile
The second way is to amend the a5da0d commit, add this new word and push it to Github as one commit. The second sounds better since it is just a minor change.
To achieve this, we would do the following:
- Modify the file. In this case, I will modify the botfile to include the word I omitted previously.
- Next, add the file to the staging area with
git add <filename>
Usually after adding files to the staging area, the next thing we do is git commit -m "our commit message" right? But since what we want to achieve here is to amend the previous commit, we would instead run:
git commit --amendThis would then bring up the text editor and prompt you to edit the message. You can decide to leave the message as it was before or change it.- Exit the editor
- Push your changes with
git push origin <branch-name
That way, both changes would be in one single commit.