Hardy Pre-Commit Hooks

A collection of pre-commit hook scripts (OK, well, not quite, keep reading), written for me, mostly by me (with an assist from two AIs, ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot).

See also: https://github.com/pre-commit/pre-commit

Scripts

commit_msg_sentiment.py : disallow negative sentiment in commit messages

Yep, that's a commit-msg git hook script

Pre-Commit is a really nice framework, and it has lots of extra goodies you should definitely check out and use. Pre-commit is capable of installing commit_msg_sentiment.py as a commit-msg Git Hook script, and has been configured to do so.

How to install

Add this to your .pre-commit-config.yaml

-   repo: https://github.com/hardyoyo/hardy_pre_commit_hooks
    rev: v1.5
    hooks:
    -   id: commit-msg-sentiment

And then ask pre-commit to install the commit-msg hook script to your repository:

pre-commit install --hook-type commit-msg

How to test

To run the test suite, cd to the tests folder, then run

python3 ./test_commit_messages.py

You can also test your own example commit messages whenever you wish with:

echo "this is a dumb commit message" | ./commit_msg_sentiment.py

This is useful when you are adjusting your configuration (see below).

Configuring

There are a few environment variables you can set to affect how commit_msg_sentiment.py functions:

MIN_COMMIT_MSG_LENGTH (defaults to 120) Mininum number of characters at which we'll switch to using TextBlob instead of Affin for sentiment analysis. TextBlob doesn't handle short strings very well, Affin does better. You may need to adjust this number to suit your own commit message style.

SENTIMENT_THRESHOLD (defaults to 0.01) Both Affin and TextBlob have a similar concept of a Sentiment Threshold. You can tinker with this number if you like, but 0.01 seems to be the sweet spot for typical commit messages.

REJECT_MSG You can customize the message that is used when rejecting a commit for negative sentiment. But, do try to be kind to yourself. That's the whole point of this.

The Story

I started thinking about this project a few years ago. I was collaborating with a new team, on an unfamiliar codebase. And I made a commit on my own personal branch, thinking I was fixing a bug I had introduced. I was wrong, it was my colleague. Someone who I trusted and appreciated. And I had to see their reaction to my mouthy, ill-considered commit message. I just wasn't used to the idea of other people seeing my commit messages, even though, of course anyone can see them. I still remember the sinking feeling, and the shame. And I thought, you know, someone should make a git hook script to reject grumpy commit messages. That would save others (and, possibly me) from that same awful feeling, of disappointing a friend.

So, I gave ChatGPT a chance to design a pre-commit hook script, and the skeleton of the implementation here is from that AI. I did all the work of putting things together, and evaluating the various sentiment analysis framework options. TextBlob turned out to be the most dependable for longer commit messages. But it offered lots of false-positives on short commit messages. I experimented a bit with various word-based approaches, then settled on Afinn as it uses a word-based approach, and has a similar threshold mechanism as TextBlob.

GitHub Copilot gets a shout-out because during the final work of putting everything together, I relied on its syntax hints to finish up the script and the tests. Some of the neutral commit messages are suggestions from Copilot.

Contributing

1. Fork it!
2. Create your feature branch: git checkout -b my-new-feature
3. Commit your changes: git commit -am 'Add some feature'
4. Push to the branch: git push origin my-new-feature
5. Submit a pull request :D

License

MIT