Co-authoring Git commits

Sometimes when I'm pair programming (or if someone's been just super helpful to me), I want to be able to give another developer credit in a commit I make in a Git repo.

There's a way to do this (that is supported in both GitHub and GitLab) from the command line! In your commit, you just have to add this to your commit message:

Co-authored-by: name <[e-mail]>

Now, if you don't know that person's email address configured in Git, I personally just run git log and then scroll through until I find it (which works well on small teams or when that person has a branch that you can checkout and run this on). You could also get a bit more fancy and run git show <some commit ID where you know they made the commit> --format=email to get just their email. Or you can be less fancy and just ask them.

This is fairly easy to do in the various Git clients out there since there's a nice open text box for it, but in case you like to use the command line, this is how you'd write it:

git commit -m "Regular commit message" -m "Co-authored-by: name <[e-mail]>"

And then, once you push, GitHub (or GitLab or wherever you host your Git projects that have this enabled) will credit that person with the commit alongside you!

Happy coding!

Comments

[Vesa Laakso]

This is neat! I am myself using the fancy --trailer flag that git commit also provides to do the same:

git commit -m "The commit message" --trailer 'Co-authored-by: name <[e-mail]>'

I have even saved this to a git alias when I'm pair-programming more often so that I get the trailer appended automatically. For example:

git config --global alias.commit-jane "commit --trailer 'Co-authored-by: Jane Doe <[e-mail]>'"

Now git commit-jane allows me to commit with Jane in Co-authored-by :)

[Oana Munteanu]

Ah this is so cool! I'm totally saving this in my gist files. thanks for sharing this!

[Chirag Aggarwal]

Github did this automatically when you commit a suggestion directly. Never know how to do this in command line. Really informative post ⭐️

[Visakh Vijayan]

nice. Appreicating is fulfilling

[Samar Fatima Jaffri]

Woa! This would be a great way of showing them that their time and effort is valued.
Thanks for sharing Cassidy!

[Oana Munteanu]

ah I feel so bad that I didn't know about this until now and so happy that now I know this. Thanks for sharing this Cassidy! <3

[Alba Rincón]

Nice! 👏
I wrote a similar one some time ago, but to use it alongside git mob, which is a cool tool for pairing!
dev.to/albarin/how-to-easily-add-c...

[Grady Salzman]

This is really great, thanks for sharing how to do this! That Grady guy also seems really cool.

[Cassidy Williams]

And sooooo smart

[Brice]

There is also more commit msg keywords convention.. for example :

Closes: $BUGNUMBER
Reviewed-by:
Suggested-by:
Tested-by:
Thanks: msg
(...)

Cf. Src old wiki, and git trailer SO post

[Jake Nelson]

Can you do this trailer action on an amend? Is it just containing that other email in the required format within the commit body message that does this or is it some kind of annotation?

[Vesa Laakso]

Yeah I think you can do a

git commit --amend --trailer 'Co-authored-by: name <[e-mail]>'

to get what you want.

And couple that with --reuse-message=HEAD to only add the trailer to the most recent commit and not even trigger an editor to open up:

git commit --amend --trailer 'Co-authored-by: name <[e-mail]>' --reuse-message=HEAD