Gits prepare-commit-message hook

So I often write bad commit messages. At best they're inconsistent - sometimes with ticket ids at the start sometimes with ticket ids at the end. Sometimes only a short message, sometimes a nicely formatted bullet point list.

Thankfully git has a tool to help you get these things consistent. Its called the "prepare-commit-msg hook"

I wrote a little python script to make a default commit message. Its not perfect but it should help... It takes the branch name, searches for a version tag and removes it, then searches for anything that might be a ticket id and adds it to the message. Finally it adds some boilerplate.

	import sys
	import subprocess
	import re
	# A normal commit will just have two arguments, this filename and the filename
	# of the commit message we want to change. Any other kind of commit we'll be
	# cowardly about and just leave as is.
	if len(sys.argv)!=2 :
	sys.exit(0)
	f = open( sys.argv[1], "r" )
	lines = f.readlines();
	f.close()
	# get the branch name
	proc = subprocess.Popen(["git", "symbolic-ref", "HEAD"], stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
	(branch_name,err) = proc.communicate()
	branch_name = branch_name.strip()
	#strip out version tags
	branch_name = re.sub(r'v\d+\.\d+','', branch_name)
	tickets= ",".join( [ ("#"+x) for x in re.split(r'\D+',branch_name) if x != '' ] )
	if tickets == "" :
	tickets= "#xxx"
	f = open( sys.argv[1], "w" )
	f.write("[%s] short message\n" %tickets)
	f.write("\n")
	f.write("longer message.\n")
	f.write(" - bullet 1\n")
	f.write(" - bullet 2\n")
	f.writelines(lines)
	sys.exit(0)

view raw prepare-commit-msg.py hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Command line git trees

Often I'm stuck in a terminal and want to see the commit history in a nice tree format. There's a nice solution ... git log recently learnt the "--graph" feature.

You can get pretty nice results from "--graph --oneline"

But using the tricks from http://www.jukie.net/bart/blog/pimping-out-git-log we can get a much nicer result - including author and branches and time all coloured nicely