How to Change a Git Commit Date (For Beginners)

I am assuming you know git commit command and its option --amend. If not, then read about them in the docs.

So, this is the template code:

git commit --amend --no-edit --date <date>

The Git internal format for setting <date> is <unix timestamp> <time zone offset>, where the unix timestamp could be replaced with other time formats like:

RFC 2822

So the 7th of April, 2005 at 22:13:13 with a time zone that is ahead of UTC by 2 hours will be written like this:

Thu, 07 Apr 2005 22:13:13 +0200 or without the ,
Thu 07 Apr 2005 22:13:13 +0200 or without the day
07 Apr 2005 22:13:13 +0200 or skip the time zone altogether
07 Apr 2005 22:13:13 or
Fri 07 Apr 2005 22:13:13

Note: As you may have noticed in the last example, I have written Friday instead of Thursday which you may think is a mistake, but it isn't. You can write the day abbreviation wrong and it won't affect the date or be recorded falsely.

ISO 8601

2005-04-07T22:13:13 or
2005-04-07 22:13:13

Note: The date part (without time) could be written in any of the following formats: YYYY.MM.DD, MM/DD/YYYY, and DD.MM.YYYY.

<time zone offset> is just the offset in hours and minutes either ahead from or after UTC. For example, EET (which is 2 hours ahead of UTC) is +0200

--no edit option amends the commit without launching the editor since you only want to change the date and not the commit message.

So if you want to change the date to 17 Aug 2022 at 08:19:19 then your git command could be like this:

git commit --amend --no-edit --date "17/08/22 20:19:19 +0200"

If, for some reason, that doesn't work for you, then you can add GIT_COMMITTER_DATE=<date> before the command like this:

GIT_COMMITTER_DATE=<date> git commit --amend --no-edit --date <date>

GIT_COMMITTER_DATE is an environment variable (Read More Here) in which you will set the <date>. An environment variable is like any variable but it affects the environment in which the program runs. Here, it kind of tricks Git into thinking it is running the commit on the current date.

Setting an Alias

If you will use this command multiple times, you could make your own git command that corresponds to this long command with its options.

To make it, you will run git config command as follows:

git config --global alias.<new-commit-name> <new-commit-correspondent>

--global makes it so that new git command can be used in all git repos made by you on the pc.

alias is just a convention name to use for custom commands.

So to set an alias for the previous command, we will run this command:

git config --global alias.dch commit --amend --no-edit --date

dch which is the custom command i chose to change the date of a commit.

There's a missing part though, the actual date but since the date is an argument, we could add it when we are running our alias like this:

git dch "17/08/22 10:10:10"

Resources

1. Git Documentation- Git commit
2. Change the date of a git commit - Article by Hugo
3. Change date git commit - Article by Alan Morel
4. Unix Timestamp Website
5. Introduction to environment variables - Medium Article