Writing commit messages is like a daily exercise you have to practice as a programmer.

Even if you are writing code for fun, it's important to realize this small detail reflects your developer personality in general.

Writing quality commits is what separates the average developer from the extraordinary one.

Do this! 👇

use Conventional Commits

A specification for adding human and machine readable meaning to commit messages

The Conventional Commits spec is like a simple guide for your commit messages. It gives you some easy rules to follow for a clear commit history, making it a breeze to build tools on top of.

The commit message should be structured as follows:

you don’t have to memorize this structure...
instead you can use a tool called : Commitizen

Commitizen assumes your team uses a standard way of committing rules and from that foundation, it can bump your project's version, create the changelog, and update files.

By default, Commitizen uses conventional commits, but you can build your own set of rules, and publish them.

for your javascript projects you can use *commmitizen * npm package :

npm i -g commmitizen 

*NOTE: *

If you're not working in a Commitizen-friendly repository, then git cz will work just the same as git commit, but npx cz will use the streamich/git-cz adapter.

To fix this, you need to first make your repo Commitizen friendly:

to achieve this you have to initialize your project to use the cz-conventional-changelog adapter by typing:

# npm
commitizen init cz-conventional-changelog --save-dev --save-exact

# yarn
commitizen init cz-conventional-changelog --yarn --dev --exact

# pnpm
commitizen init cz-conventional-changelog --pnpm --save-dev --save-exact

After running the command, you’ll see that the Commitizen config is added to the package.json file.

We used AngularJS’s commit message convention, also known as conventional-changelog, but you can use different adapters as well.

You can see a list of them here

you can now use git cz instead of git commit command :

git cz

If you want to go one step further and add some emojis to your messages as well, you can use an adapter called cz-emoji

first you have to install the adapter :

npm i cz-emoji

After installing the package, put the following configuration in the package.json file:

If you run git cz again, you’ll probably see something like this:

Drop some tips on how you write Git commits as a Software Developer!

If you like this post, check out some of my other writings :

• CODEOWNERS File: What’s the Buzz?

• sendBeacon in JavaScript

• OWASP Dependency Check in Node js 🛡️

• Practicing politeness in JavaScript code 🤬