How to solve 'Fatal: Invalid date format' in terminal (git)

Question

I have an issue where I keep getting an error message as below:

$ git commit -m "Update"
fatal: invalid date format: -7 -8 12:3:00

whenever I try to commit to or clone from a github repository - using my terminal (MacOS).

To attempt to change my date format to a 'valid' one, I have tried running commands like:

$ git commit --date="2020-07-11"

$ GIT_COMMITER_DATE="date" git commit --amend --no-edit --date "date"

and also tried changing date format to relative time:

$ git commit -m "Test" --date=format:relative:3.hours.ago

But none of these commands, including many others, work; I keep getting the same message, 'fatal: invalid date format:...'. Currently, I am unable to commit, push, nor clone my repositories on github.

If anyone has encountered a similar problem, I would absolutely love any help/advice on this issue, thanks so much.

Answer 1

Likely source of the error message: https://github.com/git/git/blob/bd42bbe1a46c0fe486fc33e82969275e27e4dc19/ident.c#L436

Your environment (which is managed by your shell) includes GIT_AUTHOR_DATE or GIT_COMMITTER_DATE (or both) with an invalid value (likely -7 -8 12:3:00). You probably ran something like the following commands:

$ export GIT_AUTHOR_DATE="-7 -8 12:3:00"
$ export GIT_COMMITTER_DATE="-7 -8 12:3:00"

Fix the problem by removing GIT_AUTHOR_DATE and GIT_COMMITTER_DATE from your shell's environment, allowing Git to fill in a default:

$ unset GIT_AUTHOR_DATE
$ unset GIT_COMMITTER_DATE