The always enthusiastic and knowledgeable mr. @jasaltvik shared with our team an article on writing (good) Git commit messages: How to Write a Git Commit Message. This excellent article explains why good Git commit messages are important, and explains what constitutes a good commit message. I wholeheartedly agree with what @cbeams writes in his article. (Have you read it yet? If not, go read it now. I'll wait.) It's sensible stuff. So I decided to start following the seven rules he proposes.
...There's only one problem: My mind is already stuffed with things I should do
and things to remember. The chance of me remembering every rule every time I
commit something, are next to 0. So I made myself a Git commit message
template. That way, I don't have to remember the rules, they are presented to
me whenever I write a commit message. So now, when I do git commit, this is
what I see in my editor:
# Title: Summary, imperative, start upper case, don't end with a period
# No more than 50 chars. #### 50 chars is here: #
# Remember blank line between title and body.
# Body: Explain *what* and *why* (not *how*). Include task ID (Jira issue).
# Wrap at 72 chars. ################################## which is here: #
# At the end: Include Co-authored-by for all contributors.
# Include at least one empty line before it. Format:
# Co-authored-by: name <user@users.noreply.github.com>
#
# How to Write a Git Commit Message:
# https://chris.beams.io/posts/git-commit/
#
# 1. Separate subject from body with a blank line
# 2. Limit the subject line to 50 characters
# 3. Capitalize the subject line
# 4. Do not end the subject line with a period
# 5. Use the imperative mood in the subject line
# 6. Wrap the body at 72 characters
# 7. Use the body to explain what and why vs. how
# Please enter the commit message for your changes. Lines starting
# with '#' will be ignored, and an empty message aborts the commit.
#
# On branch master
# Your branch is up to date with 'origin/main'.
#
# Changes to be committed:
# new file: installation.md
#
What I see consists of two parts; first my own template, then Git's standard
message asking me to "Please enter the commit message".
No need to remember everything - or really much at all, except to not use
git commit -m "Commit message", as this means I won't see the template
I made.
Here is my template*, which i put in a file called .gitmessage in my
home directory:
# Title: Summary, imperative, start upper case, don't end with a period
# No more than 50 chars. #### 50 chars is here: #
# Remember blank line between title and body.
# Body: Explain *what* and *why* (not *how*). Include task ID (Jira issue).
# Wrap at 72 chars. ################################## which is here: #
# At the end: Include Co-authored-by for all contributors.
# Include at least one empty line before it. Format:
# Co-authored-by: name <user@users.noreply.github.com>
#
# How to Write a Git Commit Message:
# https://chris.beams.io/posts/git-commit/
#
# 1. Separate subject from body with a blank line
# 2. Limit the subject line to 50 characters
# 3. Capitalize the subject line
# 4. Do not end the subject line with a period
# 5. Use the imperative mood in the subject line
# 6. Wrap the body at 72 characters
# 7. Use the body to explain what and why vs. how
To tell Git to use the template file (globally, not just in the current repo), I used the following command:
git config --global commit.template ~/.gitmessage
And that's all there was to it. (Except I have my dotfiles in a repo, so I had to do some symlinking and update one of my config-scripts to be able to recreate this setup from scratch if I need to.)
The Git documentation contains a chapter on
Customizing Git - Git Configuration
which in turn contains a section on the commit.template configuration value.
Better Commit Messages with a .gitmessage Template has a different kind of template, which is an actual template: It contains text which will become a part of the commit message.
I also made a Gist on Adding co-authors to Git commits to share the credit for collaborative efforts.
An easy way to get this config using a single command:
printf "# Title: Summary, imperative, start upper case, don't end with a period\n# No more than 50 chars. #### 50 chars is here: #\n\n# Remember blank line between title and body.\n\n# Body: Explain *what* and *why* (not *how*). Include task ID (Jira issue).\n# Wrap at 72 chars. ################################## which is here: #\n\n\n# At the end: Include Co-authored-by for all contributors. \n# Include at least one empty line before it. Format: \n# Co-authored-by: name <user@users.noreply.github.com>\n#\n# How to Write a Git Commit Message:\n# https://chris.beams.io/posts/git-commit/\n#\n# 1. Separate subject from body with a blank line\n# 2. Limit the subject line to 50 characters\n# 3. Capitalize the subject line\n# 4. Do not end the subject line with a period\n# 5. Use the imperative mood in the subject line\n# 6. Wrap the body at 72 characters\n# 7. Use the body to explain what and why vs. how\n" > ~/.gitmessage && git config --global commit.template ~/.gitmessage
Thanks a lot to @manav148, @rany2 and @drjasonharrison for the suggestions in the comments! The command I included above includes some updates I made to the template that were not there at the time of the comments; the line length indicators and the missing space in the first item of the numbered list.
*) It may be argued that this is, strictly speaking, not a template, as no part of it is actually used/included in the commit message. :)