There are many opinions on the "ideal" style in the world of development. Therefore, in order to reduce the confusion on what style internal and external developers should follow during the course of their projects, we urge all technical team members to refer to this style guide for their projects.
Reasons to follow this commit style guide is that it allows us to later automatically generate CHANGELOG.md from commit messages. An example of CHANGELOG exporter script is available here. If interested, check out this blog for more information on CHANGELOG.
A commit messages consists of three distinct parts separated by a blank line: the title, an optional body and an optional footer. The layout looks like this:
type: subject
body
footer
The title consists of the type of the message and subject.
The type is contained within the title and can be one of these types:
- feat: a new feature
- fix: a bug fix
- docs: changes to documentation
- style: formatting, missing semi colons, etc; no code change
- refactor: refactoring production code
- test: adding tests, refactoring test; no production code change
- chore: updating build tasks, package manager configs, etc; no production code change
Subjects should be no greater than 50 characters, should begin with a capital letter and do not end with a period.
Use an imperative tone to describe what a commit does, rather than what it did. For example, use change; not changed or changes.
Not all commits are complex enough to warrant a body, therefore it is optional and only used when a commit requires a bit of explanation and context. Use the body to explain the what and why of a commit, not the how.
When writing a body, the blank line between the title and the body is required and you should limit the length of each line to no more than 72 characters.
The footer is optional and is used to reference issue tracker IDs.
feat: Summarize changes in around 50 characters or less
More detailed explanatory text, if necessary. Wrap it to about 72
characters or so. In some contexts, the first line is treated as the
subject of the commit and the rest of the text as the body. The
blank line separating the summary from the body is critical (unless
you omit the body entirely); various tools like `log`, `shortlog`
and `rebase` can get confused if you run the two together.
Explain the problem that this commit is solving. Focus on why you
are making this change as opposed to how (the code explains that).
Are there side effects or other unintuitive consequenses of this
change? Here's the place to explain them.
Further paragraphs come after blank lines.
- Bullet points are okay, too
- Typically a hyphen or asterisk is used for the bullet, preceded
by a single space, with blank lines in between, but conventions
vary here
If you use an issue tracker, put references to them at the bottom,
like this:
Resolves: #123
See also: #456, #789
View Hosted Version here https://nditech.github.io/git-styleguide/
Forked from Udacity Style guide doc linked below.