Using a branch description in the commit message

In Chapter 3, Branching, Merging, and Options, we mentioned that you can set a description to your branch, and this information can be retrieved from a script using the git config --get branch.<branchname> description command. In this example, we will take this information and use it for the commit message.

We will be using the prepare-commit-msg hook. The prepare-commit-msg hook is executed every time you want to commit, and the hook can be set to anything you wish to check for before you actually see the commit message editor.

Getting ready

We need a clone and a branch to get started on this exercise, so we will clone jgit again to the chapter7.5 folder:

$ git clone https://git.eclipse.org/r/jgit/jgit chapter7.5
Cloning into 'chapter7.5'...
remote: Counting objects: 2170, done
remote: Finding sources: 100% (364/364)
remote: Total 45977 (delta 87), reused 45906 (delta 87)
Receiving objects: 100% (45977/45977), 10.60 MiB | 1.74 MiB/s, done...