Check

About

This feature checks whether the commit message follows the given committing rules. And comment in git message will be ignored.

If you want to setup an automatic check before every git commit, please refer to Automatically check message before commit.

Usage

There are three mutually exclusive ways to use cz check:

• with --rev-range to check a range of pre-existing commits
• with --message or by piping the message to it to check a given string
• or with --commit-msg-file to read the commit message from a file

Git Rev Range

If you'd like to check a commit's message after it has already been created, then you can specify the range of commits to check with --rev-range REV_RANGE.

$ cz check --rev-range REV_RANGE

For example, if you'd like to check all commits on a branch, you can use --rev-range master..HEAD. Or, if you'd like to check all commits starting from when you first implemented commit message linting, you can use --rev-range <first_commit_sha>..HEAD.

For more info on how git commit ranges work, you can check the git documentation.

Commit Message

There are two ways you can provide your plain message and check it.

Method 1: use -m or --message

$ cz check --message MESSAGE

In this option, MESSAGE is the commit message to be checked.

Method 2: use pipe to pipe it to cz check

$ echo MESSAGE | cz check

In this option, MESSAGE is piped to cz check and would be checked.

Commit Message File

$ cz check --commit-msg-file COMMIT_MSG_FILE

In this option, COMMIT_MSG_FILE is the path of the temporal file that contains the commit message. This argument can be useful when cooperating with git hook, please check Automatically check message before commit for more information about how to use this argument with git hook.

Allow Abort

cz check --message MESSAGE --allow-abort

Empty commit messages typically instruct Git to abort a commit, so you can pass --allow-abort to permit them. Since git commit accepts an --allow-empty-message flag (primarily for wrapper scripts), you may wish to disallow such commits in CI. --allow-abort may be used in conjunction with any of the other options.

Allowed Prefixes

If the commit message starts by some specific prefixes, cz check returns True without checkign the regex. By default, the the following prefixes are allowed: Merge, Revert, Pull request, fixup! and squash!.

cz check --message MESSAGE --allowed-prefixes 'Merge' 'Revert' 'Custom Prefix'

Commit message length limit

The argument -l (or --message-length-limmit) followed by a positive number, can limit the length of commit messages. For example, cz check --message MESSAGE -l 3 would fail the check, since MESSAGE is more than 3 characters long. By default, the limit is set to 0, which means no limit on the length.

Note that the limit applies only to the first line of the message.* Specifically, for ConventionalCommitsCz the length only counts from the type of change to the subject, while the body, and the footer are not counted.