Git Commit Message Hook for JIRA Issue Keys

Overview

Credits to this StackOverflow answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/53669975/1800854 ❤

Follow these steps to set up a global commit message hook that will extract the issue key from your branch id and prepend it to your commit messages automatically. This allows other team members to easily track down who wrote what code.

Steps

1. Make sure you have a variant of grep installed that supports PCRE
2. 1. On Mac you can do this using: brew install ggrep
3.  Create folder somewhere on disk for global git hooks
   

   mkdir -p ~/git/hooks

4. Make a file here called commit-msg with the following content. File is also available here.
   NOTE: Replace grep with ggrep if needed (for Mac)
   

   #!/bin/bash
   # The script below adds the branch name automatically to
   # every one of your commit messages. The regular expression
   # below searches for JIRA issue key's. The issue key will
   # be extracted out of your branch name
   # 
   # A variant of grep support the -P flag for PCRE is required
   #
   REGEX_ISSUE_ID="((?!([A-Z0-9a-z]{1,10})-?$)[A-Z]{1}[A-Z0-9]+-\d+)"
   
   # Find current branch name
   BRANCH_NAME=$(git symbolic-ref --short HEAD)
   
   if [[ -z "$BRANCH_NAME" ]]; then
       echo "No branch name... "; exit 1
   fi
   
   # Extract issue id from branch name
   ISSUE_ID=$(echo "$BRANCH_NAME" | LC_ALL=en_US.utf8 grep -o -P "$REGEX_ISSUE_ID")
   
   # Prepend issue id if it was found
   if [[ -z "$ISSUE_ID" ]]; then
       echo $(cat "$1") > "$1"
   else
       echo "$ISSUE_ID"': '$(cat "$1") > "$1"
   fi

5. Make this file executable
   

   chmod +x commit-msg

6. Configure git to globally use this folder as the global hook folder
   

   git config --global core.hooksPath ~/git/hooks

Example

Notes

The regexp used will match:

• ✔️ TASK-100
• ✔️ JAVA-1-is-the-best
• ✔️ ROBOT-777-LETS-get-it-done-2
• ✔️ issues/EASY-42-its-too-easy-baby

Works but be careful with:

• ⚠️ DEJAVU-1-DEJAVU-2-maybe-dont-do-this

Will not match:

• ❌ test-500-lowercase-wont-work
• ❌ TEST100-nope-not-like-this

Warning: Global hooks will override local repository hooks if the projects you are using utilises them.