How to Set a Default Commit Message

By  on  

Having a default commit message is really useful for a number of reasons:

  • It can formalize your commit messages
  • It serves as a good reminder for the information you should add to your commit message, like issue number
  • If you set it to "Drunk AF, don't accept this"

To set a default commit message on your local machine, start by executing the following from command line:

git config --global commit.template ~/.gitmessage

This tells your local git config to pull the text from ~/.gitmessage as the default commit message. You could set the text to something like:

Fix Issue #{number}: {description}

R+: {reviewer}

Of course, if you set your commit message via git commit -m {description}, the default will not be used, so it's a win-win!

Recent Features

  • By
    Camera and Video Control with HTML5

    Client-side APIs on mobile and desktop devices are quickly providing the same APIs.  Of course our mobile devices got access to some of these APIs first, but those APIs are slowly making their way to the desktop.  One of those APIs is the getUserMedia API...

  • By
    Vibration API

    Many of the new APIs provided to us by browser vendors are more targeted toward the mobile user than the desktop user.  One of those simple APIs the Vibration API.  The Vibration API allows developers to direct the device, using JavaScript, to vibrate in...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS Vertical Centering

    Front-end developing is beautiful, and it's getting prettier by the day. Nowadays we got so many concepts, methodologies, good practices and whatnot to make our work stand out from the rest. Javascript (along with its countless third party libraries) and CSS have grown so big, helping...

  • By
    Making the Firefox Logo from HTML

    When each new t-shirt means staving off laundry for yet another day, swag quickly becomes the most coveted perk at any tech company. Mozilla WebDev had pretty much everything going for it: brilliant people, interesting problems, awesome office. Everything except a t-shirt. That had to change. The basic...

Discussion

  1. Jake

    What if you want to include some of the lines from the default commit message in your template? One thing that is not indicated here is that the content of the default message is included with your template content (combined) when the actual commit template is displayed in the editor.

    See: commit.template section in https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Configuration

    Or test it yourself..

    BUT! What if you need to change the order that the default commit message lines appear in your templated commit message? For example..

    The default git commit message (as of this date) is:
    =======================================================================

    # Please enter the commit message for your changes. Lines starting
    # with ‘#’ will be ignored, and an empty message aborts the commit.
    #
    # On branch master
    #
    # Initial commit
    #
    # Changes to be committed:
    # new file: blah
    #
    # ———————— >8 ————————
    # Do not modify or remove the line above.
    # Everything below it will be ignored.
    diff –git a/blah b/blah
    new file mode 100644
    index 0000000..e69de29

    =======================================================================

    But what if you need it to be:

    =======================================================================
    Changes to be committed: new file: blah
    On branch master

    Initial commit

    # ———————— >8 ————————
    # Do not modify or remove the line above.
    # Everything below it will be ignored.
    diff –git a/blah b/blah
    new file mode 100644
    index 0000000..e69de29

    =======================================================================

    Where “Initial commit” is included / omitted (as it normally is) based on whether it is the initial commit or not. In other words, you want to reformat the default commit message’ content so that when it is combined with your template it will read in the order and format that you want it.

    Is there a way to do this?

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!