commitlint - pre-commit or husky

How to use tools such as pre-commit and husky to ensure your commit message follow a certain patter. This brings benefits such as semantic versioning and changelog generation.

Let’s dive into it.

The challenge

I wanted to get commitlint running with husky and found a blog post explaining it, however I wanted it in short way.

The solution

Here comes the wrap-up and also an example using pre-commit.

husky

I found automatic and recommended steps in their instruction. So here comes the condensed version with the commands

Nodejs with yarn

For a nodejs project with yarn as package manager you can use the following commands

npx husky-init && yarn
echo -n "module.exports = { extends: ['@commitlint/config-conventional'] };" >> .commitlintrc.js
yarn add --dev @commitlint/{cli,config-conventional}
npx husky add .husky/commit-msg 'npx commitlint --edit $1'

Then on every git commit your message is linted.

projen

For projen this becomes a bit different. Here are the lines which have to be added in the .projenrc.ts

import { awscdk } from 'projen';
const project = new awscdk.AwsCdkConstructLibrary({
  // other properties
  devDeps: [ /* Build dependencies for this module. */
    '@commitlint/cli',
    '@commitlint/config-conventional',
    'husky',
  ],
});
project.package.setScript('prepare', 'husky install');
project.synth();

then run the following commands

# as we need to add the 
echo -n "module.exports = { extends: ['@commitlint/config-conventional'] };" >> .commitlintrc.js
# to actually install the dependencies and the git hook
npm run projen

and you’d see the following output

$ husky install
husky - Git hooks installed

pre-commit

However if you are doing a general non-nodejs project, e.g. python or golang, then pre-commit is
the general tool which operates with python under the hood.

These are the steps for install:

# install the  tool
brew install pre-commit
# define the config
cat << EOF > .pre-commit-config.yaml
repos:
-   repo: https://github.com/commitizen-tools/commitizen
    rev: v2.42.0
    hooks:
    -   id: commitizen
EOF
# install the hook
pre-commit install --hook-type commit-msg
# run the checks manually
pre-commit run -a

Then on every git commit your message is linted as well

Conclusion

I outlined in a short way the steps to add commit message lint with either husky or pre-commit and also in projen. Me personally, I prefer having conventions on commit message, as they keep the focus small on each commit, as it has to fit in one of the categories and furthermore we are able o use tools such as

• https://github.com/caarlos0/svu
• https://github.com/git-chglog/git-chglog
• https://github.com/goreleaser/chglog
• https://github.com/goreleaser/goreleaser

which generate the CHANGELOG base on the commit messages back to the last tag.

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