Git Commit Guidelines
We have very precise rules over how our git commit messages can be formatted. This leads to morereadable messages that are easy to follow when looking through the project history. But also,we use the git commit messages to generate the AngularJS change log.
The commit message formatting can be added using a typical git workflow or through the use of a CLIwizard (Commitizen). To use the wizard, run yarn run commit
in your terminal after staging your changes in git.
Commit Message Format
Each commit message consists of a header, a body and a footer. The header has a specialformat that includes a type, a scope and a subject:
|
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The header is mandatory and the scope of the header is optional.
Any line of the commit message cannot be longer 100 characters! This allows the message to be easierto read on GitHub as well as in various git tools.
Revert
If the commit reverts a previous commit, it should begin with revert:
, followed by the headerof the reverted commit.In the body it should say: This reverts commit <hash>.
, where the hash is the SHA of the commitbeing reverted.A commit with this format is automatically created by the git revert
command.
Type
Must be one of the following:
- feat: A new feature
- fix: A bug fix
- docs: Documentation only changes
- style: Changes that do not affect the meaning of the code (white-space, formatting, missingsemi-colons, etc)
- refactor: A code change that neither fixes a bug nor adds a feature
- perf: A code change that improves performance
- test: Adding missing or correcting existing tests
- chore: Changes to the build process or auxiliary tools and libraries such as documentationgeneration
Scope
The scope could be anything specifying place of the commit change. For example $location
,$browser
, $compile
, $rootScope
, ngHref
, ngClick
, ngView
, etc…
You can use *
when the change affects more than a single scope.
Subject
The subject contains succinct description of the change:
- use the imperative, present tense: “change” not “changed” nor “changes”
- don’t capitalize first letter
- no dot (.) at the end
Body
Just as in the subject, use the imperative, present tense: “change” not “changed” nor “changes”.The body should include the motivation for the change and contrast this with previous behavior.
Footer
The footer should contain any information about Breaking Changes and is also the place toreference GitHub issues that this commit closes.
Breaking Changes should start with the word BREAKING CHANGE:
with a space or two newlines.The rest of the commit message is then used for this.
A detailed explanation can be found in this document.