This is a git hook that prefills the commit message with the diff to the changelog file. It is inspired by the mercurial extension hgchangelog.
The hook is written in Python and requires at least Python 3.3.
To install it, copy preparechangelog.py to
.git/hooks/prepare-commit-msg in your git repository (make sure the
file is executable). If you want it to be added to reposiories
automatically, you need to use a template
directory:
$ mkdir -p ~/.git-templates/hooks
$ cp preparechangelog.py ~/.git-templates/hooks/prepare-commit-msg
$ chmod +x ~/.git-templates/hooks/prepare-commit-msg
$ git config --global init.templatedir '~/.git-templates'
The default changelog filename is CHANGES, you can configure this in
your ~/.gitconfig as follows:
[changelog]
filename = CHANGES.txt
For some simple preprocessing, you can configure a callable that receives the extracted changelog diff as its argument, like this:
[changelog]
preprocess = lambda msg: msg.upper()
You can use the re module in the preprocess callable, so for a more
realistic example, to transform "Updated flux compensator (TICKET-123)" into
"Re TICKET-123: Updated flux compensator", you could use this (note that
backslashes need to be escaped in the .gitconfig file):
[changelog]
preprocess = lambda x: re.sub('(^.*) ?\\(([A-Z]+-[0-9]+)\\)\\.?$', r'Re \\2: \\1', x)