When it comes to name or describe tasks or actions, things can get difficult. Commit messages are no exception and are an important reference for any development team.
Keeping that log clean and easy to search and read is important but if you have a write pattern for your commit messages how would you locate stuff in that log?
This is where this blog post comes in. To help you with this painful task I decided to bring you the Google commit messages guideline (angular team).
What you are reading here is also available at their docs (link below).
<type>(<scope>): <subject> <BLANK LINE> <body> <BLANK LINE> <footer>
Type
Must be one of the following:
- build: Changes that affect the build system or external dependencies (example scopes: gulp, broccoli, npm)
- ci: Changes to our CI configuration files and scripts (example scopes: Travis, Circle, BrowserStack, SauceLabs)
- docs: Documentation only changes
- feat: A new feature
- fix: A bug fix
- perf: A code change that improves performance
- refactor: A code change that neither fixes a bug nor adds a feature
- style: Changes that do not affect the meaning of the code (white-space, formatting, missing semi-colons, etc)
- test: Adding missing tests or correcting existing tests
Scope
The scope should be the name of the npm package affected (as perceived by the person reading the changelog generated from commit messages.
The following is the list of supported scopes:
- animations
- common
- compiler
- compiler-cli
- core
- elements
- forms
- http
- language-service
- platform-browser
- platform-browser-dynamic
- platform-server
- platform-webworker
- platform-webworker-dynamic
- router
- service-worker
- upgrade
There are currently a few exceptions to the “use package name” rule:
- packaging: used for changes that change the npm package layout in all of our packages, e.g. public path changes, package.json changes done to all packages, d.ts file/format changes, changes to bundles, etc.
- changelog: used for updating the release notes in CHANGELOG.md
- aio: used for docs-app (angular.io) related changes within the /aio directory of the repo
- none/empty string: useful for
style,testandrefactorchanges that are done across all packages (e.g.style: add missing semicolons)
Subject
The subject contains a succinct description of the change:
- use the imperative, present tense: “change” not “changed” nor “changes”
- don’t capitalize the 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 to reference 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.