Wednesday, May 18, 2011

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.

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