Validate Commits

Validate commit messages and metadata.

Usage

$ validate-commits --help
usage: validate-commits [-h] [--since SINCE]

options:
  -h, --help     show this help message and exit
  --since SINCE  check commits since this reference

The tool will check all commits between main and the current HEAD.

Checks

Built-in rules

There are several built-in rules, which are checked automatically:

• "Commit author has no email" -- all commits must have an author email and all co-authors (in Co-authored-by trailers) must have an email.
• "Commit is empty" -- empty commits are not allowed.
• "Fixup commit" -- 'fixup' commits should be squashed into the commit they fix up.

Custom rules

Custom rules may be provided in a validate-commits-config.toml file. Rules must be provided as a regular expression pattern and an error message and will be checked against the designated target.

Commit summary

Checks for the commit summary (the first line of the commit message) may be defined in a [[checks.summary]] table, e.g:

[[checks.summary]]
pattern = '\d'
message = "Numbers in commit summary."

Author email

Checks for author and co-author email addresses may be defined in a [[checks.author_email]] table, e.g:

[[checks.author_email]]
pattern = '@example\.(com|net|org)$'
message = "Fake email address provided."

pre-commit

A pre-push hook is provided for pre-commit and can be configured in your .pre-commit-config.yaml:

default_install_hook_types: [pre-commit, pre-push]
default_stages: [pre-commit]

repos:
    # ...
    - repo: https://github.com/samueljsb/validate-commits
      rev: v0.0.3
      hooks:
          - id: validate-commits

N.B. This hook only runs in the pre-push stage. Therefore, the pre-push hook must be installed, which may require pre-commit install to be run again. To ensure other hooks are not run unexpectedly during the pre-push stage, the default stage must be set at the top level.