Git Commit Message Convention

Planted: Mar 2022

Tended: May 2022

Status: decay

Conventional Commits is a convention for adding human and machine readable meaning to commit messages.

▪ Improves a team's shared understanding of a codebase by better communicating what a commit did through:
- ▪ structure,
- ▪ clarity (through use of keywords) and
- ▪ consistency.
▪ Makes it easier to write automated tools on top of:
- ▪ automatically generating CHANGELOGs,
- ▪ automatically determining a semantic version bump (based on the types of commits landed) and
- ▪ triggering build and publish processes based on commit type.

The convention structures a commit with 2 mandatory fields and 3 optional.

> <type>[scope]: <description>> [body]> [footer(s)]_

Examples

> git commit -m "fix: broken home link"_

In Bash, you can use single quotes to write a message on multiple lines.

> git commit -m 'feat: add user-data API endpoint> > BREAKING CHANGE: remove user-name endpoint'_

> git commit -m "feat(user-profile): add user-avatar API endpoint"_

Key Word	Indicates	Correlates with SemVer
build	Build system changes
ci	CI configuration changes
docs	Documentation changes
feat	Introduce a new feature	MINOR v1.0.0 -> v1.1.0
fix	Patch a bug	PATCH v1.0.0 -> v1.0.1
perf	Performance improvements
test	Add missing / correct tests
refactor
BREAKING CHANGE	Introduce a breaking API change	MAJOR v1.0.0 -> v2.0.0