OEP-51: Conventional Commits#

OEP

OEP-0051

Title

Conventional Commits

Last Modified

2022-10-19

Authors

Ned Batchelder

Arbiter

Feanil Patel

Status

Accepted

Type

Best Practice

Created

2021-02-01

Review Period

Until 2021-03-15

Resolution

TK

References

Abstract#

Commits should be clearly labeled for their effect on consumers of the repository. To do this, we adopt the Conventional Commits guidelines, which detail structured commit messages that clarify the impact of each commit.

This is part of our Change Transparency initiative.

Motivation#

Developers should describe the changes they make. This information is valuable to many audiences: other developers, deployers, integrators, end-users, operators, and so on. Developers are in the best position to accurately describe their work and its implications.

The nearer to the change that information is captured, the easier it will be to write, and the more accurate it will be. Changes made by developers are consumed by many people, from the pull request reviewer to the final user of the product. The more the developer can explain the change, the more easily the change will be understood and used, and the more efficient the overall development process will be.

Commit messages are the closest text to the change itself. The more information-rich we can make commit messages, the more useful they will be.

Specification#

We are adopting the Conventional Commits spec, with our own specifics.

Note

Many people are familiar with the Angular commit message format, which uses conventional commits and inspired the Conventional Commits spec. We are not adopting the Angular rules.

Git commit messages have these parts:

<type>: <subject>

<body>

<footer>

Type#

We use these commit types labels:

  • build: anything to do with building or releasing the repo: Makefile, tox.ini, Travis, Jenkins, GitHub actions, and so on.

  • chore: a repetitive mechanical task such as updating requirements or translations. See Discussion below for how “chore” can hide important information, and how that can sometimes be avoided.

  • docs: documentation-only changes. Documentation changes for other types of work should be included in those commits. This includes more than the formal docs for a repo, it also covers any change that updates words describing the work, for example READMEs, ADRs, docstrings, annotations, comments, and so on.

  • feat: a new feature, or a change to an existing feature. Anything that changes the set of features. Public API entry points and their behavior are part of the feature set of a product, so changes to those should be marked with “feat”.

  • fix: bug fixes, including changes to the behavior of features, and changes that remove or mitigate security vulnerabilities.

  • perf: performance improvement.

  • refactor: code reorganization that doesn’t change behavior from the repo consumer perspective.

  • revert: undo a previous change. The previous commit message, including the type label, is included.

  • style: improve the styling of the code.

  • test: test-only changes. Adds missing tests or corrects existing tests. Tests accompanying other types of changes go into those commits.

  • temp: temporary experimental or exploratory changes that are not meant to be permanent. Occasionally changes have to be pushed to GitHub or even production that are intended to be short-lived. For example, debugging continuous integration, or ad-hoc debugging on live systems.

Breaking changes include an exclamation point as part of the type label:

feat!: remove the ability to author courses

Commits should be separated to make it easier to review them before merging and easier to understand them later. Some types work well in a combined commit, such as a feature along with its tests and documentation. Refactor, style, chore, and temp commits should be separate from more significant work.

If a commit mixes types, use the most important type label in the commit message. The priority order for the types is generally: revert, feat, fix, perf, docs, test, build, refactor, style, chore, temp.

See the tooling section for some practical exceptions around conventional commit linting for common cases like reverts or squash commits.

Scope#

The Conventional Commits spec includes an optional parenthesized scope after the type label. You may include a scope if it helps clarify the commit.

Open edX repos are large and varied, making standardization of scopes difficult. Different repos will have different needs for scopes. We currently offer no guidance for scopes to use. This may change in the future.

Subject#

Commit message subjects should be short enough to fit on one line. We aren’t putting a hard limit on character length, but 70 characters is a good time to turn your attention to the body of the commit message. Put more information in the body of the commit message to fully explain your change. In no case should the subject contain a reference to an external system that is not accessible by all members of the Open edX community.

Don’t include Jira or GitHub issue numbers in the subject. The body is the right place for links to supporting information. The subject is precious real estate that should be used for words. While it is true that it takes more work to get information from the body than from the subject, we are emphasizing writing longer commit messages, and so need to be good at reading the body anyway.

Body#

The subject of the commit is rarely enough information to fully understand the commit. The body can contain as much information as you like. Be generous. Take a moment to think about what you would want to know if someone else had authored this commit.

The more information you can put in the body of the commit message, the better. It’s not unreasonable to have two paragraphs of explanation in the body. Especially important are the reasons for the change, or other factors that won’t be apparent from the code itself.

Breaking changes especially should have detailed information about the implications and alternatives, including a BREAKING CHANGE footer.

Include references or links to supporting information, such as Jira or GitHub issues. However, the body should be necessary and sufficient for understanding the commit. Links to private issues are support for the convenience of contributors, but should not be included in the body of the commit. Rather, references or links to private issues must be included in the commit footer using the git trailer format. References to private content must use the Private-ref: token. It is always preferable for any linked issues to be public.

Larger decisions should be recorded in Architectural Decision Records, as explained in OEP-0019.

Discussion#

Conventional Commits asks us to categorize changes into a small number of categories. There will naturally be cases where it isn’t obvious which commit type to use.

Choosing the commit type label to use for a commit is important, but it’s only the first step. If you have doubts about which commit type to use, choose the highest-priority type that could apply. Then write a detailed body explaining the full complexity of your change.

feat vs fix: some user-visible changes to features could be classified as “feat” or “fix”. Choose “feat” if the change adds to the set of features. Choose “fix” if the change affects how a feature behaves. Yes, this is still subjective.

squash! or fixup! vs temp: use Git’s “squash! “ or “fixup! “ when the commit is temporary, and you intend to squash the commit into a larger commit with a different semantic label. Use “temp” when the change is temporary, but you intend to merge the commit.

Breaking changes to features: changing how a feature works is not a breaking change. For example, users are sent to a new experience instead of the old experience. This is not a breaking change. It should get a “feat” label, but not a “feat!” label.

Deprecations: deprecations happen in two steps: the announcement of the deprecation, and the eventual removal. The first step is important for people to recognize, but is not a breaking change. Use clear strong words in the commit subject to be sure people understand the importance. The second step is usually a breaking change, if a component has been removed.

Pinned dependencies: updating the version of a pinned dependency is “just” a chore, but can bring significant changes to the depending repo. Conventional commits can’t solve this problem. Reading the commits for a repo won’t show that a “chore” might have the effect of a “feat”. When updating a single targeted dependency to pull in a “feat” or a “fix”, using these labels will provide more information.

Merge commits: Commits that git generates (such as merge commits) do not follow these guidelines. This is not a reason to avoid those commits, though you may want to for other reasons. The structure of conventional commits will still be useful if merge and other auto-generated commits are in the commit history.

If you are interested to see other discussion about these sorts of questions, the Conventional Commits repo issues have a number of threads.

Rationale#

The existing Conventional Commits standard is a familiar and widely adopted standard. It’s a good place to start our own guidelines. It builds on our recently adopted pull request template to help focus developers on providing helpful information about their changes.

We’ve adapted the guidelines to our own projects, and started small.

Here’s an example of a conventional commit, with a one-line subject, and details in the body:

build: handle private.txt files properly

The requirements/edx/private.txt file is for dev's own private package
needs.  There are two installation mechanisms in edx-platform, and
neither handled the file properly:

- `paver install_prereqs` had the wrong file name.  The file was moved
  almost three years ago, and paver wasn't kept up.

- `make requirements` used `private.*` which included private.in, which
  pip-sync balks at.

Fixes: https://github.com/openedx/fake-example-repo/issues/1234
Co-authored-by: Alice Example <alice@example.com>
Private-ref: https://internal-work-tracker.example.com/BOM-2345

Tooling#

A few tools are being used to encourage and measure conformance to this standard:

  • A GitHub Action uses commitlint with our own configuration file to check the commits in pull requests. The Python cookiecutters and frontend template have been updated to install this action in new repos, and the repo-health dashboard collects information about whether the action is in place.

    Our configuration of commitlint allows for certain commit messages, like Github’s “Revert” or Git’s “squash! “ and “fixup! “ that are not meant to be merged.

  • A conventional_commits command in edx/repo-tools can examine repos and plot conformance over time.

Open Issues#

Some discussions concerning conventional commits are not yet resolved.

Scope#

Is there a standard for scopes that could be useful? Component names could be inferred from the files changed in the commit, and will vary from repo to repo. Perhaps a broad description of what is affected, such as “UI” and “API”?

Grammar#

Some commit guidelines are prescriptive about what grammar to use in commit subjects. The two popular options are imperative mood (what will this commit do? “fix: handle name changes correctly”) or past tense (what did this commit do? “fix: corrected the handling of name changes”).

Change History#

2022-10-19: Added note for alternative to “chore” when doing a targeted upgrade of a single dependency.

2022-07-20: Added Private-ref: footer for private links.

2021-11-01: Note exceptions like squash! and fixup!.

2021-11-02: Added the Tooling section.

2021-09-08: Scopes are optional, but unstandardized.

2021-03-16: Updates throughout based on review feedback.

2021-02-25: Converted to OEP-0051.

2021-02-01: A draft for review.