Did you try to enforce the Git commit message to respect a pattern, but you feel upset when your teammates are doing something like these?
JIRA-1 Let's use this style
JIRA-2: Having a colon is better
JIRA-3 : I feel upset now
It’s important to keep a clean and unique message pattern. However, how can you achieve it without cursing at each meeting? Today, I want to share with you an easy method to enforce the JIRA number, as the prefix of a git commit message. I’m using a Git hook to do this, inspired by Wenfeng’s blog.
First, let’s create a new git project and add a README file.
$ git init
$ git add README.md
Then, create a new file commit-msg to the Git hooks’ folder to hook the commit
message. If you need inspiration before your own implementation, take a look on
the samples provided by git in the hook’s folder. So let’s do:
$ vim ./.git/hooks/commit-msg
The implementation of this hook is a regex, applying to the first word of the
commit message. This word must start by a prefix of JIRA- and be followed by
a number then a colon without spaces.
#!/bin/sh
# This hook checks the commit starts with prefix "JIRA-*:".
regex='\JIRA-\d+:'
red='\033[0;31m'
default='\033[0m'
error_msg="${red}Aborting commit. Please follow the commit message pattern:
JIRA-*: Your message
For example:
JIRA-123: This is a good commit.
${default}"
if ! grep -qE "$regex" "$1"; then
echo "$error_msg" >&2
exit 1
fi
Now, the git hook configuration is done. Let’s do some commits to test it! If I do something wrong, the commit will be aborted.
$ git commit -m "JIRA-1 Let's use this style"
Aborting commit. Please follow the commit message pattern:
JIRA-*: Your message
For example:
JIRA-123: This is a good commit.
And the same error will be raised for using the colon at the wrong place. No empty space should be allowed between JIRA number and colon.
$ git commit -m "JIRA-3 : I feel upset now"
After the implementation, every developer need to hook the commit by following the pattern. The commit logs become more elegant now.
$ git log --oneline
1b39e03 JIRA-3: I
3e7162e JIRA-2: Love
5626d87 JIRA-1: Git Hooks.