Shreyas Minocha

Posted on Jun 22, 2018 • Edited on Oct 23, 2019

My commit message workflow

#git #productivity #workflow

This article was originally published on http://shreyasminocha.me/blog

I totally obsess over commit messages. I often spend minutes staring into space trying to come up with the best way to summarize the changes a commit brings. I religiously follow the seven rules of good commit messages. As you might have guessed, I've spent some time developing a workflow for writing commit messages.

I use Sublime Text 3 for most of my text-editing needs. I've also set it as my core editor.



git config --global core.editor "subl -n -w"

Note: The above requires the you to install the subl command if it doesn't work out of the box. Installation instructions: macOS · Linux · Windows.

Earlier, I used to use a package to provide syntax highlighting for commit messsages. However, build 3170 has brought native support for various git formats, commit message included.

Sublime allows you to override settings for specific syntaxes. You can edit these from ‹Preferences› → ‹Settings – Syntax Specific›. Here's my Git Commit.sublime-settings file:



{
    "rulers": [50, 72],
    "spell_check": true,
    "word_wrap": "true",
    "wrap_width": 72,
    "font_size": 14,
    "draw_centered": true
}

Note: VS Code fans can do it this way.

Somewhere on the internet, I found a template for commit messages:



# If applied, this commit will…


# Explain why this change is being made

# Provide links to any relevant tickets, articles or other resources

This template makes it easier to frame commits in accordance with the seven rules I mentioned earlier. I can't seem to remember where I found this, but in my attempts to trace it, I found a blog post providing a very similar template. As it turns out, git allows you to use a text file as a template for your commit messages.



git config --global commit.template "/Users/example/dotfiles/commit-msg-template"

When I started using this template, I had a small pet peeve about my setup. Running git commit would fire up Sublime with the cursor on the first line and to actually write the message, I would have to move the cursor one line below. With research and some experimentation, I solved the issue:



git config --global core.editor = "sublime -n -w $1:2"

The $1:2 at the end of the value opens the argument with the cursor on row 2.

Another one of my pet-peeves with the commit message text is this little snippet above the commented out git status:



# Please enter the commit message for your changes. Lines starting
# with '#' will be ignored, and an empty message aborts the commit.

While helpful to the newbie, this little notice ended up becoming an annoyance. I found a helpful answer on StackOverflow which advised using a global prepare-commit-msg hook. If you don't already have a global git hooks directory, create one and tell git about it:



git config --global core.hookspath "/Users/example/dotfiles/git-hooks"

Create prepare-commit-msg in said directory with the following content:



#!/usr/bin/env bash

sed -i.bak '/^# Please/,/^#$/ d' $1 && rm $1.bak

Edit: This snippet originally used perl followed by grep. Thanks @shaiay and @jwmevans_77's for your suggestions in the comments.

Make sure the hook is set to be executable with chmod +x. Now that pesky help notice will bother you no more.

Recently, I found this really cool utility which allows you to validate commit messages from the command line. I use a modified form of the utility in a global commit-msg hook to automatically validate every commit I make. Create commit-msg in your global git hooks directory:



#!/usr/bin/env bash

commit-msg file $1

Note: The above requires the commit-msg command to be on your $PATH. Install it using npm i -g commit-msg manually from source code.

Again, make sure the script is set to be executable. The result of this hook is that the commit would abort if my commit message does not meet the criteria.

Thanks for reading!

Top comments (32)

shaiay • Jun 22 '18

You could probably use grep -v instead of perl in your prepare-commit-msg hook

Shreyas Minocha • Jun 23 '18 • Edited

I tried this out and it almost worked except grep doesn't allow you to edit a file in-place. So I tried grep -Ev "(# Please.*|# with.*|^#$)" $1 > $1 but that didn't work.

Eventually, the following worked:

grep -Ev "(# Please.*|# with.*|^#$)" $1 > /tmp/msg
cat /tmp/msg > $1

Any better way to do this with grep -v?

shaiay • Jun 23 '18 • Edited

According to SO this is really a limitation of UNIX. The best answer I found there is (stackoverflow.com/a/29735702/5863381)

but really your solution is just fine. You can add some error checking (and make it into a one-liner):
grep -Ev .... %1 > /tmp/msg && cat /tmp/msg > $1
(this way the cat will only execute if the grep didn't produce an error)

James Evans • Jun 26 '18 • Edited

Why not use sed?
You could do the following:
sed -i '/$# Please.*\|# with.*\|^#$$/ d' $1
The -i flag will do the edits in-place, saving you having to create a temp file.
Assuming that the unwanted block always occurs at the same place, you could also do sed -i '/^# Please/,+2 d' $1 (Which will delete the line starting with "# Please" and the next 2 lines as well)

**Just noticed a typo in the second sed statement - There was a missing "/" (fixed now)

Shreyas Minocha • Jun 26 '18 • Edited

Great idea. I'll update the article to use this.

Edit: I just tried this on macOS and it errors out with sed: 1: ".git/COMMIT_EDITMSG": invalid command code .. With some searching, I learnt that BSD sed (the one that macOS uses) requires an extension with -i. However, even that gives me sed: 1: "/^# Please/,+2 d": expected context address. Apparently the +2 thing is GNU sed specific. The first statement (with -i.bak) didn't error, but didn't remove the lines either. I'm guessing it's because of inconsistencies in implementations of sed.

James Evans • Jun 28 '18 • Edited

Does the other sed command work for you (sed -i.bak '/$# Please.*\|# with.*\|^#$$/ d' $1)?
You can also try this one: sed -i.bak '/^# Please/,/^#$/ d' $1

To keep things tidy you could make it sed -i.bak '/^# Please/,/^#$/ d' $1 && rm $1.bak

Shreyas Minocha • Jun 28 '18

Perfect.

Antony Garand • Jun 22 '18

I usually use the first message from What The Commit, but I get weird looks from my coworkers afterwards.

Shreyas Minocha • Jun 24 '18 • Edited

That website is my new source of entertainment.

rhymes • Jun 27 '18

omg mine too. Thanks @antogarand !

Adrian Skar • Sep 9 '20 • Edited

Great! In case someone else needs it;
For the cursor on the first line thing on VS Code
[core] editor = \"C:\\[yourPath]\\Code.exe\" -g $1:1 --wait
in .gitconfig seems to do the trick.

-VSCode's CLI opts

Pavel Savchenko • Jun 26 '18 • Edited

Brilliant stuff! By the way, have you ever tried the GitSavvy plugin? If you did, why did you stop ? If you didn't, please try it out and let me know what you think !

Disclaimer: I occasionally contribute to GitSavvy

Also, I'd like to update your examples to use conventionalcommits.org/

Shreyas Minocha • Jun 26 '18

I'll try Git Savvy out, thanks. Yeah, I've heard of conventional commits, but they aren't for me. Whatever works for you, of course. node-commit-msg can be configured to support those, though.

Jason Ware • Jun 26 '18

For anyone having a hard time setting the core.editor, the command should be

$ git config --global core.editor 'sublime -n -w $1:2'

Shreyas Minocha • Jun 27 '18

Thanks for pointing that out. I've added some links to installation instructions.

Vasconcelos 🇧🇷 • Aug 16 '18

thanks for share it. I can't understand "pet peeve",sorry

Shreyas Minocha • Aug 16 '18

That is perfectly fine. It's a very specific pet peeve and I obviously don't expect everyone to relate to it. Feel free to interpret parts of the post as a proof of concept—such manipulation is possible.

Devin W. Leaman • Aug 16 '18

A pet peeve is just something that someone finds extremely annoying, more so than other things that might be an annoyance.

Nagarjun Palavalli • Jun 26 '18

How would you enforce this practice within a team of developers all committing to the same project? Does Git allow you to globally enforce commit templates for a repository?

Levente • Jun 29 '18

Just FYI, we work on a product (Commit Policy Plugin for Jira) that does just that. It's a Jira app, so it's hard wired to work in Jira, but allows you to enforce all kind of rules (to many VCS, not just Git).