Automatically prepare message before commit

About

It can be desirable to use commitizen for all types of commits (i.e. regular, merge, squash) so that the complete git history adheres to the commit message convention without ever having to call cz commit.

To automatically prepare a commit message prior to committing, you can use a prepare-commit-msg Git hook:

This hook is invoked by git-commit right after preparing the default log message, and before the editor is started.

To automatically perform arbitrary cleanup steps after a successful commit you can use a post-commit Git hook:

This hook is invoked by git-commit. It takes no parameters, and is invoked after a commit is made.

A combination of these two hooks allows for enforcing the usage of commitizen so that whenever a commit is about to be created, commitizen is used for creating the commit message. Running git commit or git commit -m "..." for example, would trigger commitizen and use the generated commit message for the commit.

Installation

Copy the hooks from here into the .git/hooks folder and make them executable by running the following commands from the root of your Git repository:

wget -O .git/hooks/prepare-commit-msg https://raw.githubusercontent.com/commitizen-tools/commitizen/master/hooks/prepare-commit-msg.py
chmod +x .git/hooks/prepare-commit-msg
wget -O .git/hooks/post-commit https://raw.githubusercontent.com/commitizen-tools/commitizen/master/hooks/post-commit.py
chmod +x .git/hooks/post-commit

Features

• Commits can be created using both cz commit and the regular git commit
• The hooks automatically create a backup of the commit message that can be reused if the commit failed
• The commit message backup can also be used via cz commit --retry