Semantic Pull Requests

GitHub status check that ensures your pull requests follow the Conventional Commits spec

Using semantic-release and conventional commit messages? Install this Probot app on your repos to ensure your pull requests are semantic before you merge them.

✋ Wanna check your pull requests using a GitHub Actions workflow instead? See alternatives below.

How it works

👮 Note! The default behavior of this bot is not to police all commit messages, but rather to ensure that every PR has just enough semantic information to be able to trigger a release when appropriate. The goal is to gather this semantic information in a way that doesn't make life harder for project contributors, especially newcomers who may not know how to amend their git commit history.

By default, only the PR title OR at least one commit message needs to have semantic prefix. If you wish to change this behavior, see configuration section below.

Scenario	Status	Status Check Message
PR title is semantic	💚	ready to be squashed
any commit is semantic	💚	ready to be merged or rebased
nothing is semantic	💛	add a semantic commit or PR title

Example Scenario

Take this PR for example. None of the commit messages are semantic, nor is the PR title, so the status remains yellow:

---

Edit the PR title by adding a semantic prefix like fix: or feat: or any other conventional commit type. Now use Squash and Merge to squash the branch onto master and write a standardized commit message while doing so:

---

Installation

👉 github.com/apps/semantic-pull-requests

Configuration

By default, no configuration is necessary.

If you wish to override some behaviors, you can add a semantic.yml file to your .github directory with the following optional settings:

# Disable validation, and skip status check creation
enabled: false

# Always validate the PR title, and ignore the commits
titleOnly: true

# Always validate all commits, and ignore the PR title
commitsOnly: true

# Always validate the PR title AND all the commits
titleAndCommits: true

# Require at least one commit to be valid
# this is only relevant when using commitsOnly: true or titleAndCommits: true,
# which validate all commits by default
anyCommit: true

# You can define a list of valid scopes
scopes:
  - scope1
  - scope2
  ...

# By default types specified in commitizen/conventional-commit-types is used.
# See: https://github.com/commitizen/conventional-commit-types/blob/v3.0.0/index.json
# You can override the valid types
types:
  - feat
  - fix
  - docs
  - style
  - refactor
  - perf
  - test
  - build
  - ci
  - chore
  - revert

# Allow use of Merge commits (eg on github: "Merge branch 'master' into feature/ride-unicorns")
# this is only relevant when using commitsOnly: true (or titleAndCommits: true)
allowMergeCommits: true

# Allow use of Revert commits (eg on github: "Revert "feat: ride unicorns"")
# this is only relevant when using commitsOnly: true (or titleAndCommits: true)
allowRevertCommits: true

Alternatives

This project is a GitHub App that you can install on one or many repositories, making it a convenient choice if you want to use it on lots of different repos, or even an entire GitHub organization full of repos.

If, however, you want more control over exactly how and when your pull requests are semantically checked, consider writing your own custom Actions workflow using a GitHub Action like amannn/action-semantic-pull-request.

See also https://github.com/squash-commit-app/squash-commit-app, a GitHub App which adds an empty commit to an open pull request with a single commit when the title was changed

License

Apache 2.0