Meaningful Git Commits

Earlier today, I had a friend ask me how they should structure their commits since they were working on a take home assignment for a front-end role. Although I'm not an expert on the subject, I do follow a guideline that is provided by a wonderful website called Conventional Commits.

I'll give you a quick overview as to what your commit's should look like, however I strongly recommend reading more here.

Writing commits in an organized and meaningful way allows others to understand your changes quickly, boosting productivity. It also allows you to create automated tooling around your changes.

Example Commit Message

<type>[optional scope]: <description>

[optional body]

[optional footer(s)]

The above is an example template of how to write your commits. At Boulevard, my commits would normally look like this.

feat(COPS-122): add giftcard history modal

Businesses can now look through the history of gift card transactions via a modal table.

Here you can see a clear description of the committed change, and the tag for the Kanban board ticket. That way you can reference the acceptance criteria of the feature as well.

Types of Commits

A common list (that I use) of commit types include the following:

1. fix - A commit that patches a bug in your codebase.
2. feat - A commit that adds a new feature to your codebase.
3. chore - Grunt task. Nothing a user would see, and nothing that would affect them.
4. refactor - Refactoring of existing feature.