A Productive Git Workflow

Since git is an integral part of my development life cycle and I spend quite sometime committing things to it, I always felt there was something missing, until I did my Android Nanodegree at Udacity where I learned about structured commits.

Why structure your commits?

Keeps your git history neat & meaningful.
Easy to generate change logs

Lets look at how I structure my commits.

The Commit Prefixes

feat — a new feature
fix — a bug fix
docs — changes to documentation
style — formatting, missing semi colons, etc; no logical code change
refactor — refactoring production code
test — adding tests, refactoring test; no production code change
chore — updating build tasks etc; no production code change

But you’ll be wondering how is it productive when you have to type those tags into each commit message.

So here’s a script you might want to see

https://github.com/ishan1604/productivity/blob/master/commit

Just put it into your PATH and access it easily like so

$ commit feat

So now when I do

git log --oneline --decorate --graph

Here is what it yields

This is just half the fun

Now when I want to generate a change log, I have a python script that picks up all the commits with the tags feat or fix to generate a change log for me.

Here is the python script

https://github.com/droidchef/productivity/blob/master/commit

So the output of the python script looks something like this in a change-log.json file

{  
"features":[  
      "feature 1",
      "feature 2",
      "feature 3"
   ],
"fixes":[  
      "fix 1",
      "fix2",
      "fix 3"
   ],
"major":0,
"minor":9,
"patch":11
}

You can then use this to easily curate your CHANEGLOG.md or tell your boss what you did over the last X days.

You can change this variable in the python script on line number 14 to generate the change log from the date you want

afterDate = '2016-09-12'

I’ll be adding more productivity related stuff to it soon. Till then you can give some love to the repo.

https://github.com/droidchef/productivity/