This is a best practice we highly recommend following. Separates the subject from the body with a new/blank line.Contains a body that provides a concise yet clear description of why the commit needed to be made (e.g., “Screen readers won’t read the images to users with disabilities without this information”).Provides a subject that specifies your code’s action (e.g., “Add missing link and alt text to the company’s logo”).Screen readers won't read the images to users with disabilities without this informationĪhh, that’s better! :) Now, developers can gain a better understanding of this commit message because it does the following: Now that we learned the secret to creating a good commit message, let’s try and fix the commit message from earlier: Add missing link and alt text to the company's logo Describe the problem your commit solves and how. BodyĪ concise yet clear description of what you did. GitHub has a 72-character limit so we recommend keeping your commits’ subject to within this amount. This is the change I made to the codebase.

In other words, a commit message describes what problem your changes solve and how it solves them.Įffective commits consist of two separate parts: a subject, and a body: SubjectĪ brief summary of the change you made to the project. A good commit message will explain the why behind your changes. Here’s an example of a bad commit message: fix a bugĮven though it describes what you did, the message is too vague, which leaves the other developers on your team confused. When it comes to writing commits, it is crucial to know how to write them effectively. You likely won’t remember your thought process and changes made when initially writing out the code. Having a good commit message history will also be helpful if you come back to a project you were working on after stepping away from it for a while. This is useful if a bug is found in the code that needs to be fixed! Having a good commit message history will allow you (or other developers working on your code) to quickly see what changes were made and why. Having good commits as a novice developer will help you stand out. When you are applying for jobs, employers will look through your projects on GitHub and they will look through your commit history. Yes! Let me give you a quick list of reasons why:

Why meaningful commit messages are importantĪre commit messages so important they deserve their own lesson?.

How to write a meaningful commit message.

This section contains a general overview of topics that you will learn in this lesson. This lesson will explain the importance of good commit messages, how to write them, when to commit, and why having a history of good commits is so important! Lesson overview

Git commit message guidelines