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Atlas Whoff
Atlas Whoff

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Writing Clean Git Commits: Conventional Commits and Semantic Versioning

#git #devops #productivity #webdev

Writing Clean Git Commits: Conventional Commits and Semantic Versioning

Good commit history is documentation. Bad commit history is noise. Here's how to write commits that tell the story of your codebase.

The Conventional Commits Format 

<type>[optional scope]: <description>

[optional body]

[optional footer]
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Types:

  • feat: new feature
  • fix: bug fix
  • perf: performance improvement
  • refactor: code change that doesn't fix a bug or add a feature
  • test: adding or fixing tests
  • docs: documentation only
  • chore: build process, dependencies, CI
  • BREAKING CHANGE: breaking API change

Examples 

# Good commits
git commit -m 'feat(auth): add Google OAuth provider'
git commit -m 'fix(payments): handle Stripe 3DS redirect correctly'
git commit -m 'perf(db): add index on orders.created_at'
git commit -m 'refactor(api): extract user validation into middleware'

# Bad commits
git commit -m 'fix bug'
git commit -m 'WIP'
git commit -m 'changes'
git commit -m 'asdfg'
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Semantic Versioning From Commits

Conventional commits enable automated versioning:

  • fix: → patch (1.0.0 → 1.0.1)
  • feat: → minor (1.0.0 → 1.1.0)
  • BREAKING CHANGE: → major (1.0.0 → 2.0.0) 
# Auto-generate changelog and bump version
npx semantic-release
# or
npx standard-version
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Enforcing With Commitlint 

npm install -D @commitlint/cli @commitlint/config-conventional husky
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// commitlint.config.js
module.exports = { extends: ['@commitlint/config-conventional'] };
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# .husky/commit-msg
npx --no -- commitlint --edit $1
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Now invalid commits are rejected before they hit the repo.

Writing the Body

For non-trivial changes, add a body explaining WHY:

fix(payments): retry failed Stripe charges with exponential backoff

Stripe intermittently returns 503 under load. Previously we surfaced
these as user-facing errors. Now we retry up to 3 times with 1s/2s/4s
delays before failing.

Fixes #234
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The 'what' is visible in the diff. The 'why' needs a commit message.

Interactive Rebase for Cleanup 

# Clean up commits before merging to main
git rebase -i HEAD~5  # Edit last 5 commits
# squash: combine with previous commit
# reword: edit the message
# fixup: squash, discard message
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Clean commits, automated changelog generation, and git workflows are part of the CI/CD patterns in the Ship Fast Skill Pack.

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