Tag Archives: Coding

Overwrite Author in Git History

With every commit, git records the name of the author as well as the committer along with their respective email addresses. These will be public once you push your project to GitHub. So sometimes it may be advisable to change the email addresses of the author and committer for all the past commits in your repository.

This can easily be verified by running git log.

Git keeping track of my email address …

Thankfully it is surprisingly easy to change the email addresses of author and committer in the repository. Simply run the following command in the toplevel of your working tree:

git filter-branch -f --env-filter "GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL='newemail@site.com' GIT_COMMITTER_EMAIL='newemail@site.com';" HEAD

Finally just do a push.

git push --force

Note that adding --force is important here, since otherwise the changes will be rejected by the remote with the error message:

 ! [rejected]        master -> master (non-fast-forward)
error: failed to push some refs to 'git@github.com:repo/repo.git'
hint: Updates were rejected because the tip of your current branch is behind
hint: its remote counterpart. Integrate the remote changes (e.g.
hint: 'git pull ...') before pushing again.
hint: See the 'Note about fast-forwards' in 'git push --help' for details.

Do not do a git pull in that case since that will undo the updating of the author and committer.

If you only want to update the author or committer of some of the commits, you can also use git filter-branch. For instance as follows:

git filter-branch --commit-filter '
      if [ "$GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL" = "to_update@mail" ];
      then
              GIT_AUTHOR_NAME="New Name";
              GIT_AUTHOR_EMAIL="new@email.com";
              git commit-tree "$@";
      else
              git commit-tree "$@";
      fi' HEAD

Note that it is easy for things to go wrong here with providing the multi-line commit-filter – the easiest way is to put this command into a separate script file.

Medooze Media Server Demo

I’ve recently done some research into WebRTC and specifically on how to stream media captured in the browser to a server. Initially I thought I could use something like Kinesis Video Streams and have AWS do the heavy lifting for me. Unfortunately this turned out way more complicated than I had anticipated so I started looking for other options.

That is when I came across Media Servers such as Medooze, OpenVidu, Janus and Jitsi. Medooze caught my attention since it appears to scale very well and offers a NodeJS based server.

It did take me some time to find a meaningful demo for Medooze and then to get it running. So I thought I briefly document the steps here to get a demo for Medooze up and running (note this only works on Linux or Mac OS X):

  1. Head over to the media-server-client-js project and clone it.
  2. Run the following commands:
npm i
npm run-script dist
cd demo
npm i
  1. Get the IP address of your current machine:
ifconfig | grep "inet "
  1. Using this IP, launch the Medooze server in the demo directory:
node index.js [your IP]
  1. Head to a browser and open the URL https://%5Byour ip]:8000 (for instance https://10.0.2.15:8000. Accept the SSL certificate for your localhost.

You should now see the demo page:

Clicking the buttons will create video streams:

The animation on top of the remote button is a video stream taken from a local canvas and animation/video to the right is the same stream relayed through the server.

So the client sends a stream to the server, the server sends that stream right back and the client then renders that stream.

During my local testing I encountered an issue when adding tracks with codecs (VP8, H264) that I have filed and link here for reference: Adding tracks with Codecs does not work