When pair programming or mob programming on git projects, there is a convention that allows us to document our co-authors in the commit message. However, adding the co-authorship information on every single commit is painful.

Configure gitpair to know your team members, say who you're pairing with and commit as normal. It then amends your commit to add your co-authors.

Each co-author will be added to the commit message, so that they are also credited in the github contributions view!

Before gitpair :sob:

After gitpair :heart_eyes:

Setup

First install gitpair

$ npm install -g gitpair

Add authors you'd like to pair with regularly

Add all your co-authors in a .gitpair/authors.json file higher up in directory tree or in your user's home folder:

[
  {
    "name": "Peter Yarrow",
    "email": "[email protected]",
    "aliases": ["peter"]
  },
  {
    "name": "Paul Stookey",
    "email": "[email protected]",
    "aliases": ["paul"]
  },
  {
    "name": "Mary Travers",
    "email": "[email protected]",
    "aliases": ["mary"]
  }
]

Install husky

$ npm install --save-dev husky

Then configure husky to run git pair amend on every commit, add the following to your package.json file:

"husky": {
  "hooks": {
    "post-commit": "git pair amend"
  }
}

Now, you commits will be automatically patched with the co-authoring information!

Tell gitpair you're pairing

Say you're doing some mob programming with Peter, Paul and Mary:

git pair with peter paul mary

Then commit your work

$ commit -am "Too much of nothing"

This will result in the following commit:

Author:     Benoit d'Oncieu <[email protected]>

    Too much of nothing

    Co-authored-by: Peter Yarrow <[email protected]>
    Co-authored-by: Paul Stookey <[email protected]>
    Co-authored-by: Mary Travers <[email protected]>

Other commands

know who you're pairing with

git pair info

stop pairing

git pair off

resume pairing

git pair on

print the co-authored-by trailers

git pair trailers

manually amend the last commit

git pair amend

When you don't want to install gitpair globally

If like me, you don't like to install packages globally, follow these simple instructions.

npm install --save-dev gitpair

Then add the following alias to your profile script (e.g. ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc):

alias git-pair='$(npm bin)/git-pair'

And then you can run gitpair by just using git pair.