Conventional Commits: The Communication Standard

📝 The Importance of Commit Messages

A commit message is a note to your future self and your team. “Fixed bug” is useless. “Fix null pointer in LoginActivity” is better.

Conventional Commits standardizes this format, making messages readable by both humans and machines.

Format

<type>(<scope>): <description>

• feat: A new feature (correlates with MINOR SemVer).
• fix: A bug fix (correlates with PATCH SemVer).
• docs: Documentation only changes.
• style: Changes that do not affect the meaning of the code (white-space, formatting).
• refactor: A code change that neither fixes a bug nor adds a feature.
• perf: A code change that improves performance.
• test: Adding missing tests or correcting existing tests.
• build: Changes that affect the build system or external dependencies (example scopes: gulp, broccoli, npm).
• ci: Changes to our CI configuration files and scripts (example scopes: Travis, Circle, BrowserStack, SauceLabs).
• chore: Other changes that don’t modify src or test files.
• revert: Reverts a previous commit.

🚀 Examples

Good

feat(auth): add google login button fix(home): prevent crash on orientation change docs(readme): update setup instructions

Bad

added login fixed stuff wip

🤖 Why Use It?

1. Automation: Generate changelogs automatically.
2. Versioning: Determine semantic version bumps (feat -> minor, fix -> patch).
3. Searchability: Easily grep for all fix commits in a module.

🛠️ Tools

• Commitizen: CLI tool to help you write formatted messages.
• Husky: Git hooks to lint messages before commit.
• Conventional Changelog: Generate CHANGELOG.md from git history.

🏁 Conclusion

Adopting Conventional Commits is a small habit change with massive ROI. It turns your git log into a structured database of project history.