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Git commit messages
Writing clear and concise git commit messages is important to the overall health of a project and the team that is working on the project.
Good commit messages have 3 critical benefits:
- 1.Help speed up the code review process
- 2.Help in writing good release notes
- 3.Help future maintainers (and your future self) understand why a change was made, or what exactly a particular bug was
Sample commit message
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Short (70 chars or less) summary of changes
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More detailed explanatory text, if necessary. Wrap it to about 80
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characters or so. In some contexts, the first line is treated as the
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subject of an email and the rest of the text as the body. The blank
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line separating the summary from the body is critical.
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Further paragraphs come after blank lines.
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- Bullet points are okay, too
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- A hyphen is used for the bullet, surrounded by a single space
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- The summary line is written in the imperative voice, and is structured in a way so that the message completes the sentence, “If applied, this commit will…”. For eg:
- "Split the Rx streams in RecentPatientsViewController"
- "Add Appium checkstyle task to the git pre-push hook"
- "Add query in PatientRepository to get count of sync-pending records"
- Summary lines start with words like “Add”, “Update”, and “Fix” instead of Added, Updated and Fixed
- Summary lines never end with a period, just like the subject of an email
- The explanatory text isn’t required but encouraged, especially when a commit fixes a bug. It’s good practice to explain clearly why a certain issue was occurring and how the commit fixes it.
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Sample commit message