commit-msg-must-use-emoji

💌 Easy-to-add Git hook that forces you to start every commit message with an emoji

What is this?

Once you install this, whenever you try to commit and your message doesn't start with an emoji, your commit will fail and you'll be prompted to amend it. You can bypass it by adding --no-verify to git commit.

Why is this?

Lots of people seem interested in using emoji in Git commit messages, for various reasons. You can do this in some consistent way to communicate stuff, or you can just do it to add fun to the world (or both).

Emoji bring a lot of light to my life. Do I really want them in every commit message? I don't know; let's find out.

No other tool did exactly what I wanted here, so I thought I'd play around in the wild mire of zero width joiners and fulfill them myself:

• ✨ Emoji are unicode (no shortcodes!)
• 🏄🏽‍♀️ Set it and forget it (Git hooks are simple. package.json scripts are simple.)

Installation

• If your project has a package.json
  • If you already have a commitmsg Node script
• If your project doesn't have a package.json (but Node is installed on your machine)

If your project has a package.json

The chillest way to install this tool is to use Husky. 🐶

Run npm install -D husky && npm install -D commit-msg-must-use-emoji.

(yarn add -D husky && yarn add -D commit-msg-must-use-emoji probably works too.)

Then add a commitmsg script so your package.json looks like:

{
  "...
  "scripts": {
    ...
    "commitmsg": "commit-msg-must-use-emoji",
    ...
  },
  ...
}

🎉

If you already have a commitmsg Node script

You can require this package and test a commit message string or a commit message filename (Husky stores it in process.env.GIT_PARAMS while a general Git hook node script will provide it as process.argv[2]):

const startsWithEmoji = require('commit-msg-must-use-emoji');

// e.g.
const messageString = 'Update code';
const messageFilename = '/Users/me/project/.git/COMMIT_EDITMSG';

if (!startsWithEmoji.testString(messageString)) {
  console.error('😡')
}

// or
if (!startsWithEmoji.testString(messageFilename) {
  console.error('😿');
}

🎉

If your project doesn't have a package.json (but Node is installed on your machine)

You can install this package globally (npm install -g commit-msg-must-use-emoji or yarn global add commit-msg-must-use-emoji) and then, as long as you're on a Unix machine and don't already have a commit-msg Git hook, go to your project and try

echo '#!/usr/bin/env sh
commit-msg-must-use-emoji $1' > ./.git/hooks/commit-msg && \
chmod +x ./.git/hooks/commit-msg

🎉

If you want to add this to an existing commit-msg shell script, adding commit-msg-must-use-emoji $1 somewhere in there will probably work. If you're on Windows, I'm not sure.

🌻 Thx

Thanks to all the emoji lovers, but interacting with the work of @notwaldorf, emojineer extraordinaire, has probably done the most to get me excited about emoji recently.