commitplease

Commitplease

This node.js module makes sure your git commit messages consistently follow one of these style guides:

1. jQuery Commit Guidelines
2. AngularJS Commit Guidelines

You can also make customized validation rules based on those styles.

Installation

Commitplease can be installed locally or globally (or both):

Repo-local install (adds a git hook that runs automatically upon git commit):

cd path/to/your/repo
npm install commitplease --save-dev

Global install (adds a system-wide executable to be run manually):

npm install -g commitplease

A git version of 1.8.5 or newer is recommended. If you use git commit --verbose, it is required.

Usage

The following ways to begin a commit message are special and always valid:

1. 0.0.1 or any other semantic version
2. WIP, Wip or wip which means "work in progress"
3. Merge branch [...] or Merge <commitish> into <commitish>
4. fixup! or squash! which are generated by git commit --fixup and --squash

Another special scenario is to do git commit --no-verify which will skip the commit-msg hook and bypass commitplease.

Non-special commit messages must follow one of the style guides (jQuery Commit Guidelines by default)

Repo-local install

Commit as usual. Git will trigger commitplease to check your commit message for errors. Invalid messages will prevent the commit, with details about what went wrong and a copy of the input.

Global install

Navigate to your repository and run the global commitplease executable. By default, it will check all the commit messages. Other examples include (just anything you can pass to git log really):

Use case	command
Check all commits on branch master	commitplease master
Check all commits on branch feature that are not on master	commitplease master..feature
Check the latest 1 commit	commitplease -1
Check all commits between 84991d and 2021ce	commitplease 84991d..2021ce
Check all commits starting with 84991d	commitplease 84991d..

Here you can read more about git commit ranges

Setup

You can configure commitplease from package.json of your project. Here are the options common for all style guidelines:

{
  "commitplease": {
    "limits": {
      "firstLine": "72",
      "otherLine": "80"
    },
    "nohook": false,
    "markerPattern": "^(clos|fix|resolv)(e[sd]|ing)",
    "actionPattern": "^([Cc]los|[Ff]ix|[Rr]esolv)(e[sd]|ing)\\s+[^\\s\\d]+(\\s|$)",
    "ticketPattern": "^(Closes|Fixes) (.*#|gh-|[A-Z]{2,}-)[0-9]+",
  }
}

• limits.firstLine and limits.otherLine are the hard limits for the number of symbols on the first line and on other lines of the commit message, respectively.
• "nohook": false tells commitplease to install its commit-msg hook. Setting "nohook": true makes commitplease skip installing the hook or skip running the hook if it has already been installed. This can be used when wrapping the commitplease validation API into another module, like a grunt plugin or husky. This setting does not affect the global commitplease executable, only repo-local.

The following options are experimental and are subject to change:

• markerPattern: A (intentionally loose) RegExp that indicates that the line might be a ticket reference. Case insensitive.
• actionPattern: A RegExp that makes a line marked by markerPattern valid even if the line does not fit ticketPattern
• ticketPattern: A RegExp that detects ticket references: Closes gh-1, Fixes gh-42, WEB-451 and similar.

The ticket reference match will fail only if markerPattern succeeds and both ticketPattern and actionPattern fail.

When overwriting these patterns in package.json, remember to escape special characters.

jQuery

Here is how to configure validation for jQuery Commit Guidelines:

{
  "commitplease": {
    "style": "jquery",
    "component": true,
    "components": []
  }
}

• "style": "jquery" selects jQuery Commit Guidelines
• "component": true requires a component followed by a colon, like Test: or Docs:
• "components": [] is a list of valid components. Example: "components": ["Test", "Docs"]. When this list is empty, anything followed by a colon is considered to be a valid component name.

AngularJS

Here is how to configure validation for AngularJS Commit Guidelines

{
  "commitplease": {
    "style": "angular",
    "types": [
      "feat", "fix", "docs", "style", "refactor", "perf", "test", "chore"
    ],
    "scope": "\\S+.*"
  }
}

• "style": "angular" selects AngularJS Commit Guidelines
• "types" is an array of allowed types
• "scope": "\\S+.*" is a string that is the regexp for scope. By default it means "at least one non-space character"

Husky

When using commitplease together with husky, the following will let husky manage all the hooks and trigger commitplease:

{
  "scripts": {
    "commitmsg": "commitplease"
  },
  "commitplease": {
    "nohook": true
  }
}

However, since husky does not use npm in silent mode (and there is no easy way to make it do so), there will be a lot of additional output when a message fails validation. Therefore, using commitplease alone is recommended.

API

var validate = require('commitplease/lib/validate');
var errors = validate(commit.message);
if (errors.length) {
  postComment('This commit has ' + errors.length + ' problems!');
}

validate(message[, options]), returns Array

• message (String): the commit message to validate. Must use LF (\n) as line breaks.
• options (Object, optional): use this to override the default settings
• returns Array: empty for valid messages, one or more items as String for each problem found

Examples

{
  "name": "awesomeproject",
  "description": "described",
  "devDependencies": {
    "commitplease": "latest",
  },
  "commitplease": {
    "style": "jquery",
    "components": ["Docs", "Tests", "Build", "..."],
    "markerPattern": "^((clos|fix|resolv)(e[sd]|ing))|(refs?)",
    "ticketPattern": "^((Closes|Fixes) ([a-zA-Z]{2,}-)[0-9]+)|(Refs? [^#])"
  }
}

{
  "name": "awesomeproject",
  "description": "described",
  "devDependencies": {
    "commitplease": "latest",
  },
  "commitplease": {
    "style": "angular",
    "markerPattern": "^((clos|fix|resolv)(e[sd]|ing))|(refs?)",
    "ticketPattern": "^((Closes|Fixes) ([a-zA-Z]{2,}-)[0-9]+)|(Refs? [^#])"
  }
}

Uninstall

Remove your configurations of commitplease from your package.json, if any.

If you are running npm 2.x, then:

npm uninstall commitplease --save-dev

If you are running npm 3.x, you will have to remove the hook manually:

rm .git/hooks/commit-msg
npm uninstall commitplease --save-dev

There is an open issue to npm about this.

License

Copyright Jörn Zaefferer
Released under the terms of the MIT license.

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