vaicommits

Progressive AI Commits

A CLI that writes your git commit messages for you with AI, with progressive refinement in CLI. Never write a commit message again.

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Setup

The minimum supported version of Node.js is the latest v14. Check your Node.js version with node --version.

1. Install vaicommits:

   npm install -g vaicommits

2. Retrieve your API key from OpenAI

   Note: If you haven't already, you'll have to create an account and set up billing.

3. Set the key so vaicommits can use it:

   vaicommits config set OPENAI_KEY=<your token>

   This will create a .aicommits file in your home directory.

Upgrading

Check the installed version with:

vaicommits --version

If it's not the latest version, run:

npm update -g vaicommits

Usage

CLI mode

You can call vaicommits directly to generate a commit message for your staged changes:

git add <files...>
vaicommits

vaicommits passes down unknown flags to git commit, so you can pass in commit flags.

For example, you can stage all changes in tracked files with as you commit:

vaicommits --all # or -a

👉 Tip: Use the vaic alias if vaicommits is too long for you.

Generate multiple recommendations

Sometimes the recommended commit message isn't the best so you want it to generate a few to pick from. You can generate multiple commit messages at once by passing in the --generate <i> flag, where 'i' is the number of generated messages:

vaicommits --generate <i> # or -g <i>

Warning: this uses more tokens, meaning it costs more.

Generating Conventional Commits

If you'd like to generate Conventional Commits, you can use the --type flag followed by conventional. This will prompt vaicommits to format the commit message according to the Conventional Commits specification:

vaicommits --type conventional # or -t conventional

This feature can be useful if your project follows the Conventional Commits standard or if you're using tools that rely on this commit format.

Git hook

You can also integrate vaicommits with Git via the prepare-commit-msg hook. This lets you use Git like you normally would, and edit the commit message before committing.

Install

In the Git repository you want to install the hook in:

vaicommits hook install

Uninstall

In the Git repository you want to uninstall the hook from:

vaicommits hook uninstall

Usage

1. Stage your files and commit:

   git add <files...>
   git commit # Only generates a message when it's not passed in

   If you ever want to write your own message instead of generating one, you can simply pass one in: git commit -m "My message"

2. Aicommits will generate the commit message for you and pass it back to Git. Git will open it with the configured editor for you to review/edit it.

3. Save and close the editor to commit!

Configuration

Reading a configuration value

To retrieve a configuration option, use the command:

vaicommits config get <key>

For example, to retrieve the API key, you can use:

vaicommits config get OPENAI_KEY

You can also retrieve multiple configuration options at once by separating them with spaces:

vaicommits config get OPENAI_KEY generate

Setting a configuration value

To set a configuration option, use the command:

vaicommits config set <key>=<value>

For example, to set the API key, you can use:

vaicommits config set OPENAI_KEY=<your-api-key>

You can also set multiple configuration options at once by separating them with spaces, like

vaicommits config set OPENAI_KEY=<your-api-key> generate=3 locale=en

Options

OPENAI_KEY

Required

The OpenAI API key. You can retrieve it from OpenAI API Keys page.

locale

Default: en

The locale to use for the generated commit messages. Consult the list of codes in: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes.

generate

Default: 1

The number of commit messages to generate to pick from.

Note, this will use more tokens as it generates more results.

proxy

Set a HTTP/HTTPS proxy to use for requests.

To clear the proxy option, you can use the command (note the empty value after the equals sign):

vaicommits config set proxy=

model

Default: gpt-3.5-turbo

The Chat Completions (/v1/chat/completions) model to use. Consult the list of models available in the OpenAI Documentation.

Tip: If you have access, try upgrading to gpt-4 for next-level code analysis. It can handle double the input size, but comes at a higher cost. Check out OpenAI's website to learn more.

timeout

The timeout for network requests to the OpenAI API in milliseconds.

Default: 10000 (10 seconds)

vaicommits config set timeout=20000 # 20s

max-length

The maximum character length of the generated commit message.

Default: 50

vaicommits config set max-length=100

type

Default: "" (Empty string)

The type of commit message to generate. Set this to "conventional" to generate commit messages that follow the Conventional Commits specification:

vaicommits config set type=conventional

You can clear this option by setting it to an empty string:

vaicommits config set type=

How it works

This CLI tool runs git diff to grab all your latest code changes, sends them to OpenAI's GPT-3, then returns the AI generated commit message.

Video coming soon where I rebuild it from scratch to show you how to easily build your own CLI tools powered by AI.

Maintainers

• Original Author: Hassan El Mghari (@nutlope)
• Fork Maintainer: Vivek Nair (@virtuallyvivek)

Contributing

If you want to help fix a bug or implement a feature in Issues, checkout the Contribution Guide to learn how to setup and test the project