Smartgit: Auto insert commit message

Question

Is there a way to auto insert the commit message in Smartgit with a hook script? (Bash). If a user commit\'s his change, I want to preload the commit message field.

Answer 1

Unfortunately, SmartGit does not support pre-commit git hook. However, since SmartGit 18.2, commit message templates are supported (SmartGit What's new). Sadly, these templates are static.

If, like me, your goal is to preload a commit message based on the branch name, you can use a workaround in which a static commit message template is generated dynamically every time the post-checkout git hook is triggered.

This is how it works:

First, install a git post-checkout hook that writes a commit message template based on the branch name. For example, if your feature branches names are ISSUE-123/feature/new-awesome-feature, and you want the commit message to be prefixed with the issue key ISSUE-123, then the following script could be used (I prefer Python):

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import pygit2


GIT_COMMIT_TEMPLATE = ".git/.commit-template"


def main():
    branch_name = pygit2.Repository('.').head.shorthand
    issue_key = branch_name.split('/')[0]

    with open(GIT_COMMIT_TEMPLATE, "w") as file:
        file.write(f"{issue_key}: ")


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Second, configure git commit template. Using the filename from the example above, we get:

git config commit.template .git/.commit-template

Bonus tips:

1. It’s possible to use the same configuration across all repositories, by using a global git hooks path (as seen here):

git config --global core.hooksPath /path/to/my/centralized/hooks

and installing the commit template globally:

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

2. In the post-checkout script it’s possible to extract the the git commit message template file path from the git configuration. For example:

pygit2.Repository(".").config["commit.template"]