guides-local-setup.md

Guide: Local setup

Get high commit message quality and short feedback cycles by linting commit messages right when they are authored.

This guide demonstrates how to achieve this via git hooks.

Install commitlint

Install commitlint and a commitlint-config-* of your choice as devDependency and configure commitlint to use it.

# Create a package.json if needed
npm init

# Install and configure if needed
npm install --save-dev @commitlint/{cli,config-angular}
echo "module.exports = {extends: ['@commitlint/config-angular']};" > commitlint.config.js

Alternatively the configuration can be defined in .commitlintrc.js, .commitlintrc.json, or .commitlintrc.yml file or a commitlint field in package.json.

Install husky

Install husky as devDependency, a handy git hook helper available on npm.

npm install --save-dev husky

This allows us to add git hooks directly into our package.json scripts.

{
  "scripts": {
    "commitmsg": "commitlint -e"
  }
}

Using commitmsg gives us exactly what we want: It is executed everytime a new commit is created. Invoking commitlint with the -e|--edit flag causes it to correctly read the commit message from .git/COMMIT_MSG.

Test

You can test the hook by simple commiting. You should see something like this if everything works.

git commit -m "foo: this will fail"
husky > npm run -s commitmsg

⧗   input: foo: this will fail
✖   type must be one of [build, chore, ci, docs, feat, fix, perf, refactor, revert, style, test] [type-enum]
✖   found 1 problems, 0 warnings

husky > commit-msg hook failed (add --no-verify to bypass)

git commit -m "chore: lint on commitmsg"
husky > npm run -s commitmsg

⧗   input: chore: lint on commitmsg
✔   found 0 problems, 0 warnings

?> Local linting is fine for fast feedback but can easily be tinkered with. To ensure all commits are linted you'll want to check commits on an automated CI Server to. Learn how to in the CI Setup guide.