<title>Fix Contributions Using Wrong Email

[lambocorp]

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I'm missing commits on my contribution graph.

My friend's used this pc before -- his email was stored in the git config.
The commits were done using his email address. He's not part of the current project though.

The "help" section seems to recommend I add his email to my account, then ask if he'll verify it?
If I remove his email after, will I lose the contributions though?

[linuxlawson]

I'm not 100% sure, but I think you would lose those contributions after removing his email address.
Since they have to be connected to his email, once removed, the contributions will disappear too.

You might want to read through this also: https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-and-managing-your-github-profile/managing-contribution-settings-on-your-profile/why-are-my-contributions-not-showing-up-on-my-profile

[lambocorp]

I read something about if I rebase the branch, I get shared credit on the commits. Is that something that might help?

[linuxlawson]

Shared credit? I'm not familar with that. Where did you read this?
It sounds like it might help but I cant be for sure. 😕

[airtower-luna]

The "help" section seems to recommend I add his email to my account, then ask if he'll verify it?
If I remove his email after, will I lose the contributions though?

That'd be a really bad idea because you'd be mixing addresses for different people, and yes, the contributions would be gone as soon as you remove the address (well, maybe they'd stay until some cache expires).

First of, make sure you fix the user.email and user.name settings on your computer. This will fix things for future commits.

If you then want to fix the past commits, you need to rewrite the repository history to change the author email in those commits. If it's just a few commits interactive rebase and git commit --amend --reset-author on the affected commits is probably easiest, for a lot of commits the filter-branch approach described at the very end of the article might work better. Fair warnings: ⚠️

• Changing history means that anyone who already has a copy of the old history will have to manually accept the change.
• After rewriting history you'll have to force-push the affected branches. Double check that the data you're pushing is correct and up to date, because it will destroy whatever is on those branches on GitHub.

[lambocorp]

Thanks everyone, eventually I got it, "filter-branch" is advised against generally, so I used the recommended:
"git filter-repo --mailmap ../.mailmap"
helpful stack overflow

[bgriffen]

I made a change-author.sh script, as I was having all sorts of trouble with filter-branch for some reason. In my case, steps were

1. Make backup
2. Make sure everything at remote and origin were in sync (no updates needed).
3. Create change-author.sh

#!/bin/sh
git filter-branch --env-filter '
OLD_EMAIL="myold@email.com"
CORRECT_NAME="My Name"
CORRECT_EMAIL="mynew@email.com"

if [ "$GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL" = "$OLD_EMAIL" ]; then
    export GIT_COMMITTER_NAME="$CORRECT_NAME"
    export GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL="$CORRECT_EMAIL"
fi

if [ "$GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL" = "$OLD_EMAIL" ]; then
    export GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="$CORRECT_NAME"
    export GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="$CORRECT_EMAIL"
fi
' --tag-name-filter cat -- --branches --tags

5. Then run bash change-author.sh in the top level of the repo.

In my case, there were no other branches and no other authors so it was as simple as it gets, I would be very careful about running the above if you have a multiple authors/branches or unstaged changes. I can confirm it updated my github activity to be correct.

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