By writing good commits, you are simply future-proofing yourself. You could save yourself and/or coworkers hours of digging around while troubleshooting by providing that helpful description.
To come up with thoughtful commits, consider the following:
- Why have I made these changes?
- What effect have my changes made?
- Why was the change needed?
- What are the changes in reference to?
It's not necessary, but it helps you figure out what you should write.
The commit type can include the following:
- feat – a new feature is introduced with the changes
- fix – a bug fix has occurred
- chore – changes that do not relate to a fix or feature and don't modify src or test files (for example updating dependencies)
- refactor – refactored code that neither fixes a bug nor adds a feature
- docs – updates to documentation such as a the README or other markdown files
- style – changes that do not affect the meaning of the code, likely related to code formatting such as white-space, missing semi-colons, and so on.
- test – including new or correcting previous tests
- perf – performance improvements
- ci – continuous integration related
- build – changes that affect the build system or external dependencies
- revert – reverts a previous commit