📝 Better Commits

A CLI for writing better commits, following the conventional commit guidelines, written with Typescript | ZOD | Clack

Screen.Recording.2023-03-09.at.8.04.43.AM.mov

✨ Features

• Follows the conventional commit guidelines
• Highly flexible configuration
• Easy install with sane defaults
• Checks git status with interactive git add
• Works globally or in your repository
• Attempts to infer ticket/issue and type from branch
• Pretty prints preview in color
• Validates config at runtime

📦 Installation

npm install -g better-commits

🚀 Usage

When you're ready to commit. To run the CLI in your terminal:

better-commits
# or
npx better-commits

It will prompt a series of questions. These prompts will build a commit message, which you can preview, before confirming the commit.

To better understand these prompts and their intention, read Conventional Commits Summary

To modify, these prompts, see configuration.

⚙️ Configuration

Your first time running better-commits, a default config will be generated in your $HOME directory, named .better-commits.json. -- This is your global config, it will be used if a repository-specific config cannot be found.

To create a repository-specific config, navigate to the root of your project.

• run better-commits-init

This will create a config named .better-commits.json with all of the defaults. From there, you can modify it to suit your needs.

All properties are optional, they can be removed from your configuration and will be replaced by the defaults at run-time.

Defaults

{
	"check_status": true,
	"commit_type": {
		"enable": true,
		"initial_value": "feat",
		"infer_type_from_branch": true,
		"options": [
			{
				"value": "feat",
				"label": "feat"
			},
			{
				"value": "fix",
				"label": "fix"
			},
			{
				"value": "docs",
				"label": "docs"
			},
			{
				"value": "refactor",
				"label": "refactor"
			},
			{
				"value": "perf",
				"label": "perf"
			},
			{
				"value": "test",
				"label": "test"
			},
			{
				"value": "",
				"label": "none"
			}
		]
	},
	"commit_scope": {
		"enable": true,
		"initial_value": "app",
		"options": [
			{
				"value": "app",
				"label": "app"
			},
			{
				"value": "shared",
				"label": "shared"
			},
			{
				"value": "server",
				"label": "server"
			},
			{
				"value": "tools",
				"label": "tools"
			},
			{
				"value": "",
				"label": "none"
			}
		]
	},
	"check_ticket": {
		"infer_ticket": true,
		"confirm_ticket": true,
		"add_to_title": true,
		"append_hashtag": false
	},
	"commit_title": {
		"max_size": 70
	},
	"commit_body": {
		"enable": true,
		"required": false
	},
	"commit_footer": {
		"enable": true,
		"initial_value": [],
		"options": [
			"closes",
			"breaking-change",
			"deprecated"
		]
	},
	"breaking_change": {
		"add_exclamation_to_title": true
	},
	"confirm_commit": true
}

✅ Config Validation

To simplify the CLI, some rules are enforced at runtime to make sure the program runs properly.

• any property can be removed from the config, it will be replaced by the default at run-time
• if a property is a string/number/boolean in the default, it must stay that type
• the initial_value must be a valid value in the corresponding options
• commit_scope and commit_type can be populated with as many or whatever options
  • must maintain the shape {value: string, label?: string, hint?: string}
  • hint and label are optional
  • to force scope or type to be required, remove None
• commit_footer options are supplied from a fixed list, because they have specific functionality
  • thus, you can remove from that list, but you can't add custom values to it

🔎 Inference

better-commits will attempt to infer the ticket/issue and the type from your branch name. It will auto populate the corresponding field if found.

Ticket

• STRING-NUMBER -- If a string-number is at the start of the branch
• /STRING-NUMBER -- If a string-number comes after a /

Issue

• NUMBER -- If a number is at the start of the branch
• /NUMBER -- If a number comes after a /

Type

• TYPE- -- If a type is at the start of the branch
• TYPE/ -- If a slash comes after the type
• -TYPE- -- If a type is between two dashes

😮 Mildly Interesting

• better-commits works with Semantic Release
• if you use better-commits to create your first commit on a new branch, when you open a PR for that branch, it will properly auto-populate the title and body.
• when you squash / merge with github, if better-commits is your first commit, all later commits like "addressing comments", "fixing mistake". Will be prefixed with an asterisk for easy deletion. This way you maintain your pretty commit even when squashing.
• if you use a branch name like the ones below, better-commits will be able to infer your ticket/issue and type
  • TYPE/TICKET-description
  • USER/TYPE/TICKET-description
• if you're using Github issues to track your work, and select the closes footer option when writing your commit. Github will automatically link and close that issue when your pr is merged
• better-commits is much smaller than its alternative commitizen
• better-commits uses native git commands under the hood. So any hooks, tools, or staging should work as if it was a normal commit.

❓ Troubleshooting

TTY initialization failed: uv_tty_init returned EBADF (bad file descriptor). This may happen because you're running something like git-bash on Windows. Try another terminal/command-prompt or winpty to see if its still an issue.

Alternatives

• Commitizen