GIT - Conventional Commits

Hey folks, how’s it going? Today I’m sharing a tip on how to standardize commit messages in our projects. Sometimes when there’s more than one developer on the project and the rush of day-to-day life, the messages end up not being that great. It’s very common to see the famous “AD” (various changes) or “VA” (multiple changes), which makes our dev life — which is already not easy — much harder :D.

Conventional Commits was inspired by the Angular Commit Guidelines and provides us with a set of rules for creating a commit history, making it easier to write with automated tools. This convention pairs nicely with SemVer, describing features, fixes, and breaking changes.

The commit message should be structured as follows:

<type>[optional scope]: <description>

[optional body]

[optional footer(s)]

The commit contains the structural elements to communicate the intent to whoever consumes your library:

1. Fix: a commit of type fix patches a bug in your codebase (this correlates with PATCH in semantic versioning).
2. Feat: a commit of type feat introduces a new feature to the codebase (this correlates with MINOR in semantic versioning).
3. BREAKING CHANGE: a commit that has the footer BREAKING CHANGE, or appends ! after the type/scope, introduces a breaking API change (correlated with MAJOR in semantic versioning). A BREAKING CHANGE can be part of commits of any type.
4. Types other than fix and feat are allowed — for example, @commitlint/config-conventional recommends build:, chore:, ci:, docs:, style:, refactor:, perf:, test:, and others.

INSTALLING GIT COMMIT MSG LINTER

Luckily for us, some developers created a package that helps us maintain the commit pattern automatically.

For our test I’ll use the git-commit-msg-linter package.

I’ll create a simple project to test the plugin. Create a directory called commit-conventional:

mkdir commit-conventional

After running the command above, enter the directory:

cd commit-conventional

We need to initialize git:

git init

Now let’s create the package.json file — for that, run the command (you need to have Node.js installed on your machine):

npm init -y

Now that we have our package.json created, let’s install the package:

npm install git-commit-msg-linter --save-dev

Create any text file:

touch test.php

Let’s add the changes to our staging area:

git add .

If you still have trouble with git commands, click here where I explain some basic commands.

To run the test, execute:

git commit -m 'ADD a new file in project'

The error shown below will be generated, indicating that our commit doesn’t follow the standard.

Now let’s commit again, this time following the conventional commits standard:

git commit -m "feat: add new file into project"

Now everything is perfect with our commit. You can see how much clearer and more organized our commit messages are.

I hope you enjoyed this tip. If you have any questions, suggestions, or critiques, leave them in the comments.

SOURCES:

https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0/

https://www.npmjs.com/package/git-commit-msg-linter