git-prefix-issue-hooks

Hooks and scripts for automatically preparing commit messages with a feature prefix and an issue number from the local branch config.

Place the files in your working directory's .git/hooks sub-directory. You can do this by cloning the repository directly into that directory, then updates can be installed automatically with git pull origin master.

Requires a python installation; assumes the binary is located at /usr/bin/python

Required git branch config keys commitprefix and issue

There are two core git config keys used in these hooks: commitprefix and issue. commitprefix should be a short name to identify the feature or branch with which a commit should be associated. These are configured per-branch using git config branch.<branch_name>.(commitprefix|issue). When commitprefix is configured for the current git branch, commit messages in the editor or generated with the git commit -m command-line switch will be prepended with the commitprefix value enclosed in parentheses. issue is any task-tracking (Jira, etc.) issue number associated with the branch. It will be appended in its own paragraph to the end of the commit message.

In .git/config, commitprefix or issue show up as a per-branch key, for example:

[branch "snout\_"]
    remote = ...
    merge = ...
    issue = AN-99435
    commitprefix = snout

Branch config key warnings

Unless the current branch is one of a number of excluded branch names such as master or trunk, or HEAD for detached head mode, a warning will be output to the console or inserted as a comment in the commit message if either commitprefix or issue is not set. These warnings can be turned off for a given branch by setting git config branch.<branch\_name>.nowarn true (Note that any value will work, including, counterintuitively, false, since what the hook checks is whether the key nowarn exists at all).

Branch inherited config upon creation/checkout

When a new branch is created, the post-checkout hook will check if the new branch is set to track another branch. If it is, the values for commitprefix and issue will be inherited from the branch it is tracking, for convenience. Note that this will happen whenever a non-excluded branch is checked out (unless it already has commitprefix and issue), not only when it is created. I find it convenient to set git's configuration so that new branches automatically track the current branch, to take advantage of this feature.

Convenince commands/aliases

These hooks come with some convenience aliases in the file aliases-gitconfig. These aliases need to be included in your git config file, either by manually copying-and pasting the file contents into .git/config, or preferrably by using git's [include] config key in .git/config (assuming your version of git supports it). This way updates to aliases-gitconfig will be picked up automatically:

[include]
    path = hooks/aliases-gitconfig

• git branch-commitprefix and git branch-issue make it more convenient to set or query commitprefix and issue for the current branch. Use them without an argument to check the current value, or with an argument to set a new value, similar to how git config works.

• git branch-current simply prints the name fo the current branch.

• git branch-upstream prints the name of the branch the current branch is tracking, which will be used to inherit commitprefix and issue values. Note that the tracking branch can be set using git branch --set-upstream-to=<branch_name>.