Fix Common Git Mistakes
Change a Commit Message that Hasn't Been Pushed Yet
If you make a mistake in a commit message but HAVEN'T pushed it yet, you can change that commit message with --amend:
git commit --amend -m "New message"
This won't change any of the files in your commit - but will rewrite the commit with the new message.
Instructor: [0:00] Let's start a new git project by going to New on GitHub and entering a repository name of git_mistakes. I'll make that public and initialize it with a README.
[0:14] Once it's created, I can find the clone link and in a terminal I will git clone that repository. Then I can cd into it. I'm going to touch index.html, which'll be the first file that we make. In a text editor, we can open that folder.
[0:35] In our index.html file, let's paste in some HTML. Now we want to add this to a commit. First, let's do a git status to see that we have index.html that is not tracked yet. It's untracked. We can add index.html. Now if we do a git status, we have it as changes to be committed.
[0:56] This is what we call staged or in the index. We can commit that with git commit -m. We'll say adding index.html to git mistooks.
[1:08] As soon as I type that, I realize that I said mistooks instead of mistakes, so I want to change that commit message. Since I haven't pushed this yet, I can just say git commit --ammend. Now I can say that I want to give it a new message of adding index.html to git mistakes.
[1:30] If I do a git log --oneline, I can see I have my initial commit that GitHub made when it made the project, and then I have my adding index.html to git mistakes. It actually rewrote the commit message that had a typo in it.