https://github.com/nh2/git-rewrite-history-on-patches
Script to replace words in a range of recent git commits
https://github.com/nh2/git-rewrite-history-on-patches
Last synced: 2 months ago
JSON representation
Script to replace words in a range of recent git commits
- Host: GitHub
- URL: https://github.com/nh2/git-rewrite-history-on-patches
- Owner: nh2
- Created: 2020-07-10T21:25:10.000Z (almost 5 years ago)
- Default Branch: master
- Last Pushed: 2020-07-10T21:34:09.000Z (almost 5 years ago)
- Last Synced: 2025-01-23T18:20:32.035Z (4 months ago)
- Language: Python
- Homepage:
- Size: 1.95 KB
- Stars: 3
- Watchers: 1
- Forks: 1
- Open Issues: 0
-
Metadata Files:
- Readme: README.md
Awesome Lists containing this project
README
# git-rewrite-history-on-patches
Script to replace words in a range of recent git commits.
## When you need this
Example: You've added a feature called `floors`, and mentioned that word a lot in the code.
After many commits you want to change terminology and decide it should better be called `levels` instead.
You want to rewrite all your recent commits to replace `floors` by `levels`, so that each commit still remains correct by itself.
You figured you cannot use `git filter-branch --tree-filter` with e.g. a `sed`-based repalcement, because that does not understand to operate _only_ on the actual changed lines in your range of recent commits, so it'd replace lots of unrelated `floors` occurrences from outside your commit range.
## Approach
Works by:
* exporting the range using `git format-patch`
* doing search-and-replace on the .patch files (that's what this script does)
* re-importing the patches using `git am`.
## Example usage
To replace some words (defined in the script) in the last 9 commits on `mybranch`:
```sh
git checkout mybranch
git branch mybranch-backup # always first make a backup!
```
```sh
# Clean up stuff from previous iterations to get the replacements right
git am --abort
rm -rf patches
git reset --hard mybranch-backup
# Run
git format-patch --output-directory patches mybranch~9
./git-rewrite-history-on-patches.py patches/*.patch
git reset --hard mybranch~9
git am --ignore-whitespace patches/*.patch.new
```
If a patch doesn't apply, you can check whether it was rewritten correctly using a diff-tool, e.g.
```sh
meld patches/0001*
```