OpenCommit

Follow the bird

Auto-generate meaningful commits in 1 second

Killing lame commits with AI 🤯🔫

🪩 Winner of GitHub 2023 HACKATHON

All the commits in this repo are authored by OpenCommit — look at the commits to see how OpenCommit works. Emojis and long commit descriptions are configurable.

You can use OpenCommit by simply running it via the CLI like this oco. 2 seconds and your staged changes are committed with a meaningful message.

1. Install OpenCommit globally to use in any repository:

   npm install -g opencommit

2. Get your API key from OpenAI. Make sure that you add your payment details, so the API works.

3. Set the key to OpenCommit config:

   opencommit config set OCO_OPENAI_API_KEY=<your_api_key>

   Your API key is stored locally in the ~/.opencommit config file.

OpenCommit is now available as a GitHub Action which automatically improves all new commits messages when you push to remote!

This is great if you want to make sure all of the commits in all of your repository branches are meaningful and not lame like fix1 or done2.

Create a file .github/workflows/opencommit.yml with the contents below:

name: 'OpenCommit Action'

on:
  push:
    # this list of branches is often enough,
    # but you may still ignore other public branches
    branches-ignore: [main master dev development release]

jobs:
  opencommit:
    timeout-minutes: 10
    name: OpenCommit
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions: write-all
    steps:
      - name: Setup Node.js Environment
        uses: actions/setup-node@v2
        with:
          node-version: '16'
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
        with:
          fetch-depth: 0
      - uses: di-sukharev/[email protected]
        with:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

        env:
          # set openAI api key in repo actions secrets,
          # for openAI keys go to: https://platform.openai.com/account/api-keys
          # for repo secret go to: <your_repo_url>/settings/secrets/actions
          OCO_OPENAI_API_KEY: ${{ secrets.OCO_OPENAI_API_KEY }}

          # customization
          OCO_OPENAI_MAX_TOKENS: 500
          OCO_OPENAI_BASE_PATH: ''
          OCO_DESCRIPTION: false
          OCO_EMOJI: false
          OCO_MODEL: gpt-3.5-turbo
          OCO_LANGUAGE: en

That is it. Now when you push to any branch in your repo — all NEW commits are being improved by your never-tired AI.

Make sure you exclude public collaboration branches (main, dev, etc) in branches-ignore, so OpenCommit does not rebase commits there while improving the messages.

Interactive rebase (rebase -i) changes commits' SHA, so the commit history in remote becomes different from your local branch history. This is okay if you work on the branch alone, but may be inconvenient for other collaborators.

You can call OpenCommit directly to generate a commit message for your staged changes:

git add <files...>
opencommit

You can also use the oco shortcut:

git add <files...>
oco

Create a .env file and add OpenCommit config variables there like this:

OCO_OPENAI_API_KEY=<your OpenAI API token>
OCO_OPENAI_MAX_TOKENS=<max response tokens from OpenAI API>
OCO_OPENAI_BASE_PATH=<may be used to set proxy path to OpenAI api>
OCO_DESCRIPTION=<postface a message with ~3 sentences description>
OCO_EMOJI=<add GitMoji>
OCO_MODEL=<either gpt-3.5-turbo or gpt-4>
OCO_LANGUAGE=<locale, scroll to the bottom to see options>
OCO_MESSAGE_TEMPLATE_PLACEHOLDER=<message template placeholder, example: '$msg'>

Local config still has more priority than Global config, but you may set OCO_MODEL and OCO_LOCALE globally and set local configs for OCO_EMOJI and OCO_DESCRIPTION per repo which is more convenient.

Simply set any of the variables above like this:

oco config set OCO_OPENAI_API_KEY=gpt-4

Configure GitMoji to preface a message.

oco config set OCO_EMOJI=true

To remove preface emojis:

oco config set OCO_EMOJI=false

By default, OpenCommit uses gpt-3.5-turbo-16k model.

You may switch to GPT-4 which performs better, but costs ~x15 times more 🤠

oco config set OCO_MODEL=gpt-4

or for as a cheaper option:

oco config set OCO_MODEL=gpt-3.5-turbo

Make sure that you spell it gpt-4 (lowercase) and that you have API access to the 4th model. Even if you have ChatGPT , that doesn't necessarily mean that you have API access to GPT-4.

To globally specify the language used to generate commit messages:

# de, German ,Deutsch
oco config set OCO_LANGUAGE=de
oco config set OCO_LANGUAGE=German
oco config set OCO_LANGUAGE=Deutsch

# fr, French, française
oco config set OCO_LANGUAGE=fr
oco config set OCO_LANGUAGE=French
oco config set OCO_LANGUAGE=française

The default language setting is English All available languages are currently listed in the i18n folder

The opencommit or oco commands can be used in place of the git commit -m "${generatedMessage}" command. This means that any regular flags that are used with the git commit command will also be applied when using opencommit or oco.

oco --no-verify

is translated to :

git commit -m "${generatedMessage}" --no-verify

To include a message in the generated message, you can utilize the template function! For instance:

oco '$msg #205’

opencommit examines placeholders in the parameters, allowing you to append additional information before and after the placeholders, such as the relevant Issue or Pull Request. Similarly, you have the option to customize the OCO_MESSAGE_TEMPLATE_PLACEHOLDER configuration item, for example, simplifying it to $m!"

You can remove files from being sent to OpenAI by creating a .opencommitignore file. For example:

path/to/large-asset.zip
**/*.jpg

This helps prevent opencommit from uploading artifacts and large files.

By default, opencommit ignores files matching: *-lock.* and *.lock

You can set OpenCommit as Git prepare-commit-msg hook. Hook integrates with your IDE Source Control and allows you to edit the message before committing.

To set the hook:

oco hook set

To unset the hook:

oco hook unset

To use the hook:

git add <files...>
git commit

Or follow the process of your IDE Source Control feature, when it calls git commit command — OpenCommit will integrate into the flow.

You pay for your requests to OpenAI API. OpenCommit uses ChatGPT (3.5-turbo) official model, which is ~15x times cheaper than GPT-4.