commit

Using commitizen cli

About¶

In your terminal run cz commit or the shortcut cz c to generate a guided git commit.

You can run cz commit --write-message-to-file COMMIT_MSG_FILE to additionally save the generated message to a file. This can be combined with the --dry-run flag to only write the message to a file and not modify files and create a commit. A possible use case for this is to automatically prepare a commit message.

Note

To maintain platform compatibility, the commit command disable ANSI escaping in its output. In particular pre-commit hooks coloring will be deactivated as discussed in commitizen-tools/commitizen#417.

Usage¶

cz commit --help

git options¶

git command options that are not implemented by commitizen can be use via the -- syntax for the commit command. The syntax separates commitizen arguments from git commit arguments by a double dash. This is the resulting syntax:

cz commit <commitizen-args> -- <git-cli-args>

# e.g., cz commit --dry-run -- -a -S

For example, using the -S option on git commit to sign a commit is now commitizen compatible: cz c -- -S

Note

Deprecation warning: A commit can be signed off using cz commit --signoff or the shortcut cz commit -s. This syntax is now deprecated in favor of the new cz commit -- -s syntax.

Retry¶

You can use cz commit --retry to reuse the last commit message when the previous commit attempt failed. To automatically retry when running cz commit, you can set the retry_after_failure configuration option to true. Running cz commit --no-retry makes commitizen ignore retry_after_failure, forcing a new commit message to be prompted.

Commit message length limit¶

The argument -l (or --message-length-limit) followed by a positive number can limit the length of commit messages. An exception would be raised when the message length exceeds the limit. For example, cz commit -l 72 will limit the length of commit messages to 72 characters. 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.