History rewriting safely

Choose the right rewrite command and understand how to recover or publish the result.

Warning: Rewriting history changes commit IDs. Coordinate with collaborators before rewriting shared branches, and expect to force-push afterward.

Choose a command

Goal Command Can Git Wrangler roll it back?
Change author names or emails rewrite-authors Yes
Add, replace, or remove coauthors rewrite-coauthors Yes
Generate better commit messages with AI rewrite-commits Yes
Redistribute commits across dates rewrite-dates Yes
Move commits into daily working hours rewrite-hours Yes
Permanently remove secret files remove-secrets No
Restore supported Git Wrangler rewrites rollback-rewrites —

Before rewriting

  1. Commit or stash current work.
  2. Make sure collaborators know the branch history will change.
  3. Run the command without --yes and read the preview.
  4. Keep a separate backup when the history is especially important.

Rewrite commands refresh origin before planning. Use --no-fetch only when offline or when you intentionally accept that remote information may be old.

How rollback works

Git Wrangler keeps the original state of commits changed by supported rewrite commands. Later supported rewrites extend the same recovery point, so one rollback-rewrites run restores the history from before those changes while keeping newer commits where possible.

remove-secrets is different. It clears earlier rewrite recovery data before removing files and does not create a new recovery point. This prevents a later rollback from bringing deleted secrets back.

After rewriting

Inspect the result locally, then publish it with lease protection:

git-wrangler log
git-wrangler push --force

Tags are not the main rewrite target, and commit or tag signatures may no longer be valid after history changes. Collaborators may need to reset or re-clone after the force push.

Date filters

Commands with --rewrite-after and --rewrite-before select commits using the author dates currently shown in history:

after <= selected commit < before

The start date is included and the end date is excluded.