commitizen

What is commitizen?

Commitizen is a tool that helps you write consistent and conventional commit messages. It provides a command-line interface (CLI) to guide you through the process of creating commit messages that follow a specified convention, such as the Angular commit message guidelines.

What are commitizen's main functionalities?

Interactive Commit Prompts

Commitizen provides an interactive CLI that prompts you to fill out the different parts of a commit message, ensuring that your commits follow a specified convention. Running `npx cz` will start the interactive prompt.

npx cz

Custom Adapters

Commitizen supports custom adapters that define different commit message conventions. For example, you can initialize the `cz-conventional-changelog` adapter to follow the Angular commit message guidelines.

npx commitizen init cz-conventional-changelog --save-dev --save-exact

Configuration

Commitizen allows you to configure the adapter in your project's `package.json` file. This configuration tells Commitizen which adapter to use for generating commit messages.

{
  "config": {
    "commitizen": {
      "path": "./node_modules/cz-conventional-changelog"
    }
  }
}

Other packages similar to commitizen

commitlint

Commitlint checks if your commit messages meet the conventional commit format. It can be used in conjunction with Commitizen to enforce commit message conventions. While Commitizen helps you write commit messages, Commitlint ensures that they adhere to the specified guidelines.

standard-version

Standard Version is a tool for versioning and changelog generation based on conventional commit messages. It automates the process of version bumping and changelog generation, which complements Commitizen's functionality of creating consistent commit messages.

semantic-release

Semantic Release automates the versioning and package publishing process based on the commit messages. It uses the same conventional commit guidelines that Commitizen helps enforce, making it a good companion tool for automating releases.

README

Commitizen for contributors

When you commit with Commitizen, you'll be prompted to fill out any required commit fields at commit time. No more waiting until later for a git commit hook to run and reject your commit. No more digging through CONTRIBUTING.md to find what the preferred format is. Get instant feedback on your commit message formatting and be prompted for required fields.

Installing the command line tool

Installation is as simple as running the following command (add sudo if on OSX/Linux):

npm install -g commitizen

Using the command line tool

Now, simply use git cz instead of git commit when committing.

When you're working in a Commitizen friendly repository, you'll be prompted to fill in any required fields and your commit messages will be formatted according to the the standards defined by project maintainers.

If you're not working in a Commitizen friendly repository, then git cz will work just the same as git commit.

Commitizen for project maintainers

As a project maintainer, making your repo Commitizen friendly allows you to select pre-existing commit message conventions or to create your own custom commit message convention. When a contributor to your repo uses Commitizen, they will be prompted for the correct fields at commit time.

Making your repo Commitizen-friendly

For this example, we'll be setting up our repo to use AngularJS's commit message convention also known as conventional-changelog.

First, install the Commitizen conventional-changelog adapter into your project.

npm install cz-conventional-changelog

Then just add .cz.json to the root of your repository with the following contents:

{
  "path": "node_modules/cz-conventional-changelog/"
}

This just tells Commitizen which adapter we actually want our contributors to use when they try to commit to this repo.

Congratulations your repo is Commitizen-friendly. Time to flaunt it!

Add the Commitizen-friendly badge to your README using the following markdown:

[![Commitizen friendly](https://img.shields.io/badge/commitizen-friendly-brightgreen.svg)](http://commitizen.github.io/cz-cli/)

Your badge will look like this:

It may also make sense to change your README.md or CONTRIBUTING.md to include or link to the Commitizen project so that your new contributors may learn more about installing and using Commitizen.

Philosophy

About Commitizen

Commitizen is an open source project that helps contributors be good open source citizens. It accomplishes this by prompting them to follow commit message conventions at commit time. It also empowers project maintainers to create or use predefined commit message conventions in their repos to better communicate their expectations to potential contributors.

Commitizen or Commit Hooks

Both! Commitizen is not meant to be a replacement for git commit hooks. Rather, it is meant to work side-by-side with them to ensure a consistent and positive experience for your contributors. Commitizen treats the commit command as a declarative action. The contributor is declaring that they wish to contribute to your project. It is up to you as the maintainer to define what rules they should be following.

We accomplish this by letting you define which adapter you'd like to use in your project. Adapters just allow multiple projects to share the same commit message conventions. A good example of an adapter is the cz-conventional-commit adapter.

Authors and Contributors

Jim Cummins (@JimTheDev)