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. Also, currently we do not support custom core.commentchar, so let us know if you set one.

You could also install a global commitplease executable and put it into a package.json script or as a git hook of your choice. Here is an example with a pre-push hook:

#!/bin/sh

npm run commitplease --silent

And chmod +x .git/hooks/pre-push. Now each time you do a git push, the hook will be checking all commits on current branch.

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!, as generated by git commit --fixup and --squash, but any content afterwards is accepted

Other ways to make your commit messages special and bypass style checks are described below.

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 all commits on current branch that are not on master	commitplease master..HEAD
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"]. Members of this list are surrounded by ^ and $ and are treated as a regular expression. 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"

Skip style check

This paragraph assumes that you would like to skip the style check that happens during git commit. One way to do so is to type git commit --no-verify that will skip a few git hooks, including the one used by commitplease. If skipping many hooks is not what you want or you find yourself doing it too many times, just set the nohook option. You could set that inside package.json as described at the beginning of the setup section. However, if modifying package.json is not possible, just set it in .npmrc (it will overwrite package.json) like so:

[commitplease]
nohook = true

Husky

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

{
  "scripts": {
    "commitmsg": "commitplease .git/COMMIT_EDITMSG"
  },
  "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. Moreover, husky will run your scripts entry and nothing more, so you have to specify everything yourself (e.g. the path to the commit message file). 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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