Templates

In this example, we will see how to create a template commit message that will be displayed in the editor when creating a commit. The template is only for the local user and not distributed with the repository in general.

Getting ready

In this example, we will use the example repository from Chapter 1, Navigating Git:

$ git clone https://github.com/dvaske/data-model.git
$ cd data-model

We'll use the following code as a commit message template for commit messages:

Short description of commit

Longer explanation of the motivation for the change

Fixes-Bug: Enter bug-id or delete line
Implements-Requirement: Enter requirement-id or delete line

Save the commit message template in $HOME/.gitcommitmsg.txt. The filename isn't fixed and you can choose a filename of your liking.

How to do it...

To let Git know about our new commit message template, we can set the configuration variable commit.template to point at the file we just created with that template; we'll do it globally so it is applicable...