Lint commit messages

conventional-changelog-lint

• 🚓 Enforce commit conventions
• 🤖 Plays nice with conventional-changelog
• 📦 Supports shareable configuration

Installation

Fetch it with npm

npm install --save-dev conventional-changelog-lint

Usage

conventional-changelog-lint provides a command line and node interface.

CLI

The command line interface reads .conventional-changelog-lintrc resolves extends configurations.

❯ conventional-changelog-lint --help
  conventional-changelog-lint - Lint commit messages against a conventional-changelog preset and ruleset

  [input] reads from stdin if --edit, --from, --to are omitted
  --color,-c    toggle formatted output, defaults to: true
  --edit,-e     read last commit message found in ./git/COMMIT_EDITMSG
  --extends,-x  array of shareable configurations to extend
  --from,-f     lower end of the commit range to lint; applies if edit=false
  --preset,-p   conventional-changelog-preset to use for commit message parsing, defaults to: angular
  --to,-t       upper end of the commit range to lint; applies if edit=false
  --quiet,-q    toggle console output

Recipes

git hook

As a commitmsg git-hook with "husky"

  {
    "scripts": {
      "commitmsg": "conventional-changelog-lint -e"
    }
  }

Last commit

As part of npm test

  {
    "scripts": {
      "test": "conventional-changelog-lint --from=HEAD~1"
    }
  }

Lint all commits in Pull Request

You can lint all commits in a PR by passing all commits that are present in SOURCE_BRANCH but unavailable in BASE_BRANCH:

conventional-changelog-lint --from=BASE_BRANCH to=SOURCE_BRANCH

Most of the time BASE_BRANCH will be master for Github Flow.

This assumes SOURCE_BRANCH is available on your local checkout. This is not true by default for all PRs originating from clones of a repository.

Given you'd like to lint all commits in PR origination from branch remote-test on the repository github.com/other-name/test targeting master on github.com/your-name/test:

cd test # make sure CWD is in your repository
git remote add other-name https://github.com/other-name/test.git
git fetch other-name

conventional-changelog-lint --from=master --to=other-name/test

See scripts/lint:commit.sh for an example on how to obtain SOURCE_BRANCH from a Github clone automatically on Travis.

Travis

Commit Linting on CI has to handle the following cases

• Direct commits
• Branch Pull Requests
• Fork Pull Requests

An exemplary implementation is provided as bash script working on Travis CI.

# Force full git checkout
before_install: git fetch --unshallow

script:
  - ./scripts/lint:commit.sh # [1] scripts/lint:commit.sh

[1]: See scripts/lint:commit.sh for reference

API

The programming interface does not read configuration by default, it has to be provided as second parameter.

import lint from 'conventional-changelog-lint';
const report = lint(
  'docs: add node api interface usage',
  {
    preset: {},
    configuration: {}
  }
);

To achieve the same behavior as with the command line interface you can use the provided utility functions:

import lint from 'conventional-changelog-lint';
import {
  getPreset,
  getConfiguration
} from 'conventional-changelog-lint';

const report = lint(
  'docs: add node api interface usage',
  {
    preset: await getPreset('angular'),
    configuration: await readConfiguration('conventional-changelog-lint')
  }
);

Configuration

conventional-changelog-lint is configured via .conventional-changelog-lintrc and shareable configuration.

When no .conventional-changelog-lintrc is found it will use the angular shareable config. See the documentation there for default rules.

When a .conventional-changelog-lintrc is found it will not load any preset unless specified via extends configuration.

extends

{
  "extends": ["angular"]
}

Array of shareable configurations to extend. Configurations are resolved as conventional-changelog-lint-config-${name} and have to be installed. See npm search for available shareable configurations.

---

⇨ See shareable-config for details

preset

{
  "preset": "angular"
}

conventional-changelog preset name to use for parsing of commit messages.

---

⇨ See conventional-changelog for details

rules

{
  "rules": {
    "body-leading-blank": [1, "always"],
    "header-max-length": [1, "always", 72],
    "subject-full-stop": [1, "never", "."]
  }
}

Rules applicable to the linted commit messages. By default all rules are turned off via a level of 0. They can be enabled by shareable configuration, such as the angular config, which is loaded by default.

---

⇨ See rules for details

wildcards

Patterns to exclude from linting

wildcards: {
  merge: [
    '/^(Merge pull request)|(Merge (.*?) into (.*?)$)/'
  ],
  release: [
    '/^\\d.\\d.\\d$/'
  ],
  revert: [
    '/^revert: (.*)/'
  ]
}

Shallow clones

TL;DR

Perform git fetch --shallow before linting.

Most likely you are reading this because you where presented with an error message:

  'Could not get git history from shallow clone.
  Use git fetch --shallow before linting.
  Original issue: https://git.io/vyKMq\n Refer to https://git.io/vyKMv for details.'

Explanation

git supports checking out shallow clones of a repository to save bandwith in times. These limited copies do not contain a full git history. This makes conventional-changelog-lint fail, especially when running on large commit ranges. To ensure linting works every time you should convert a shallow git repo to a complete one. Use git fetch --shallow to do so.

Travis

Ensure full git checkouts on TravisCI, add to .travis.yml:

before_install:
  - git fetch --unshallow

Appveyor

Ensure full git checkouts on AppVeyor, add to appveyor.yml:

shallow_clone: false

Supported Node.js versions

conventional-changelog-lint supports the active Node.js LTS version and higher: >= 4

Related projects

• angular-precommit – Pre commit with angular conventions

• conventional-changelog-cli – Generate a changelog from conventional commit history

• cz-conventional-changelog-lint – Let an interactive command line interface help you with creating commit messages matching your conventional-changelog-lint configuration

• conventional-changelog-lint-config-angular – Shareable conventional-changelog-lint config enforcing the angular commit convention

• conventional-changelog-lint-config-atom – Shareable configuration for conventional-changelog-lint based on the atom commit guidelines

• conventional-changelog-lint-config-patternplate – Lint your commits, patternplate-style

• conventional-commits-detector – Detect what commit message convention your repository is using

• conventional-github-releaser – Make a new GitHub release from git metadata

• conventional-recommended-bump – Get a recommended version bump based on conventional commits

• commitizen – Simple commit conventions for internet citizens

• standard-changelog – Generate a changelog from conventional commit history, angular-style

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Copyright 2016 by Mario Nebl and contributors. Released under the MIT license.