checkcommits

checkcommits

Overview

The checkcommits tool is used to perform basic checks on git(1) commits in a repository. It is designed to be run on pull request branches.

By default, it will ensure:

• A commit subject line is specified.

• The commit subject contains a "subsystem" (adjust using --subject-length=). A "subsystem" is simply one or more words followed by a colon at the start of the subject and designed to identify the area of the code the change applies to.

• The commit subject is not overly long (adjust using --body-length=).

• A commit body is specified.

• No line in the commit body is overly long.

Optionally, various other checks can be enabled (such as checking for at least one "Fixes #XXX" entry in the commits and ensuring each commit contains a developer sign-off).

Handling long lines

Sometimes, long lines are required in a commit body. For example, a crash dump or log file extract may easily result in a block of text with very long lines.

To cater for this scenario, this tool employs a very simply heuristic: line length limits only apply if the line begins with an alphabetic character. This has the following attractive properties:

• Log files tend to start with numerics so sometimes get handled automatically.

• Emails can be quoted using the usual leading > character.

• Any type of information can be made "special" simply by indenting it to ensure the first character in the line is not alphanumeric. Clearly, this gives committers a way to bypass the checks but the hope is they won't stoop to this ;)

Finally, the signed-off lines are never length checked (as it is unreasonable to penalise people with long names).

Handling revert commits

Sometimes commits need to be undone or "backed out" using git revert. The tool handles such commits specially since the subject line is reformatted and the body is auto-generated by git revert.

Note:

If you need to revert a commit, do not modify the commit subject line as modified by git revert since the tool still performs checks on this (although note that for reverts the tool ignored the body).

Options

Verbose mode

By default, no output will be generated unless an error is found. However, enabling verbose mode will show the commits as they are checked. To enable verbose mode either specify --verbose or set CHECKCOMMITS_VERBOSE=1.

For full details

Run:

$ ./checkcommits -h

How to use it

Download and Build

$ repo="github.com/kata-containers/tests/cmd/checkcommits"
$ go get -d "$repo"
$ (cd "$GOPATH/src/$repo" && make)

This will install checkcommits into your workspace’s bin directory, so ensure $GOPATH/bin is in your $PATH.

Basic use

$ checkcommits "$commit" "$branch"

Example showing most of the available options:

$ checkcommits --verbose --need-fixes --need-sign-offs --body-length 99 --subject-length 42 "$commit" "$branch"

Run under TravisCI

$ checkcommits "$TRAVIS_COMMIT" "$TRAVIS_BRANCH"