Today I learned how to create co-authored commits on GitHub.

Co-authored commits

On GitHub, co-authored commits allow you to add two or more people as the authors of a commit, effectively marking that commit as a contribution done by multiple users. When a commit has co-authors, GitHub displays those multiple authors next to the commit, as shown in the image below:

Adding a co-author

To add co-authors to a commit, the extended commit message should end with a Co-authored-by line, that looks like this:

Co-authored-by: NAME <GITHUB EMAIL>

If you use the co-author's GitHub email, then the commit will count as a contribution by that author. To find the author's GitHub email, either ask them, or figure the email out on your own.

Finding a GitHub email

To find the email someone uses on GitHub, start by finding a commit they made (for example, open their repositories and open a random commit in one of their repositories). That will give you a link that ends with a long commit hash.

For example, for the commit of the screenshot above, the URL is https://github.com/EuroPython/website/pull/1023/commits/66fefa8d679f96eef658432e5425c19c13fbb030.

Then, add .patch to that URL, which will open a very basic page with some info on that commit; most importantly, at the top is the information of the author of the commit. As an example, if you add .patch to the URL I showed above, the top of the page will show this information:

From 66fefa8d679f96eef658432e5425c19c13fbb030 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: =?UTF-8?q?Rodrigo=20Gir=C3=A3o=20Serr=C3=A3o?=
 <5621605+rodrigogiraoserrao@users.noreply.github.com>
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2025 16:54:26 +0000
Subject: [PATCH] Add Rust Summit info.

If you squint your eyes, you'll find the email I use on GitHub!

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References

• GitHub Docs, Creating a commit with multiple authors https://docs.github.com/en/pull-requests/committing-changes-to-your-project/creating-and-editing-commits/creating-a-commit-with-multiple-authors [last accessed 27-02-2025];