Hi Hackers,
About 10 days ago, I came across the #GitHubHack23 post and then I thought: "Hmm... ain't I got something to contribute?" — squinting my eyes like this 😑
What I Built
Meet OpenCommit as a GitHub Action 🪅
With OpenCommit action set in a repository, every commit pushed is automatically improved with a meaningful message about what was changed and the rationale behind those changes.
You can find the Action in the GitHub marketplace here and follow the instructions to set it up in your repository.
Thanks to @mishmanners for clarifying that building great things on top of existing great things is a great thing 💚
Category Submission:
I'm submitting the Action for the 'Maintainer Must-Haves' category as it helps maintainers follow a rational behind the changes contributed by reading clean and meaningful commit messages.
And I'm also submitting the Action for the 'DIY Deployments' category as a custom CI script that improves open-source collaboration experience.
App Link
You can access the Action page here, and the repository here.
Screenshots
Description
With the Action set in a repository, all commits are automatically improved with meaningful, clear, and easy-to-follow messages on every push to any branch.
You may exclude branches like main and dev from the Action via a custom setting.
Here's how to set up.
Link to Source Code
Find the source code for the Action here.
Permissive License
OpenCommit is distributed under the MIT License — you can find the license here.
Background
I was inspired to create OpenCommit from my experiences as a maintainer. When there are tens of PRs waiting to be merged — it's a true joy to open a PR and follow a trail of meaningful commit messages that tell you what changed and why.
And now if some of the contributions lack clear and concise commit messages — you set OpenCommit GitHub Action on top of your repo to solve the problem and auto-improve commit messages on every push to any branch you want.
How I Built It
Wow, it's a long story :)
The journey of creating this GitHub Action started with a known problem in the current GitHub ecosystem: the quality and consistency of commit messages depends on a collaborator. I decided to develop a solution leveraging GitHub Actions and OpenCommit to make commit messages being auto-generated for all the collaborators.
I guess, with more and more powerful LLMs coming — we are the last generation of engineers who are manually typing the commit messages (and maybe typing at all lol)
The Stack
The Action is built using TypeScript and Node.js, popular choices for GitHub Actions due to their excellent support for asynchronous operations, a crucial requirement considering the multiple I/O operations involved. In the initial setup, I used the actions/toolkit package which provides useful utilities to streamline the creation of GitHub Actions. I picked @actions/core for basic functionalities such as inputs, outputs, and error handling, @actions/github to interact with GitHub's REST API, and @actions/exec to execute shell commands.
The Algorithm
The core function of the action is improving commit messages. I achieved this by combining GitHub's APIs with the openAI's GPT (3.5 model — cheap and powerful). I utilized Octokit, GitHub’s official client library for Node.js, to fetch commit messages from the PR context. These commit messages are then passed as prompts to the openAI API, which then generates an enhanced version of each commit message.
Workflow and Usage
The action is designed to run on push events, specifically when a new commit is pushed to a PR. This triggers the action, which then fetches the commit messages, improves them as per Conventional Commits concept, and finally replaces the original ones.
You may also turn on GitMoji convention if you prefer your messages baked with emojis 🤠
Testing and Refactoring
The initial prototype had some shortcomings; for instance, it did not handle errors and exceptions well, making it less robust. Therefore, a significant amount of time was spent on refactoring the codebase. The action was thoroughly tested across a variety of scenarios to ensure its reliability and robustness.
Challenges and Learnings
Throughout the journey, there were numerous challenges. However, they presented learning opportunities. One significant challenge was ensuring the correct handling of Git commands in different environments. I learned a great deal about GitHub Actions internal workings, and how to manage and manipulate commit histories. Another challenge was working with the GPT API and optimize the calls to make the tool run cheap.
Future Improvements
Building on an already powerful package that offers an array of features was a pivotal part of this GitHub Action. The base package supports more than ten languages, incorporates GitMoji, and offers robust algorithms to manage any-size commit diffs. This, combined with smart prompts for GPT to generate the best commit message results, provides a solid foundation for future enhancements.
Looking ahead, I plan to introduce more customization options, allowing users to specify the level of verbosity and the style of their commit messages with prefixes and postfixes.
Additionally, I aim to enhance language support further, catering to global non-English speaking users, thus broadening the action's reach.
I'm also adding GitHub Codespaces configs to the repo to make open-source collaboration experience easier — you would just click "Run in a Codespace" on the README and instantly create a PR from your browser 🧙
In conclusion, the development of this GitHub Action has been a highly rewarding process, full of valuable learnings about GitHub's ecosystem, CI/CD practices, Git operations, and the power of AI in automating mundane tasks.
Additional Resources/Info
Here are some helpful resources that guided me in this project:
A big thank you to @mishmanners, @github, and dev.to for such a fun 10 days 😅
Feel free to give OpenCommit a try in your projects, and any feedback is welcomed!
I need to get some sleep now
Top comments (31)
cool idea! I've been trying to get my team to write better commits, but it didn't really work 🙂
Obligatory xkcd.com/1296/
lol true, you start with good and finish with
uihihi, thanks, that happens, lol :) if you try and like (or don't) OpenCommit as an Action for the whole team repo — please leave me a feedback in the issues
Nice work, Dima! I can see myself using this in the future. Would it be possible to also generate a PR description as well? Like when someone creates a pull request an action will be triggered that will generate a description based on the changes.
+1 That would be great for PRs also.
gonna do the PRs, also thought about it :) fully automated git pipelines
next opencommit is doing is writing code for you and committing it after AI-TDD tests pass
This is very cool, this part in particular where you're generating the commit message based on the diff and how the prompt for that is constructed with one example, it would be interesting to see the output if the prompt's example is based on the programming languages used in the diff.
thank you bro! i also like the code, try it out as a Github Action :)
Hey, this is a pretty clever use of GPT. I can see how this could really help in maintaining a clean and coherent commit history. As someone who sometimes gets a bit lazy with commit messages, I might give it a shot. Thanks for your work on this!
that's great, I was so bored with lame messages like
fixedand `done — so i created this tool i use everydayAnd thus deprive future LLMs of training data. Or, rather, force future LLMs data pipelines to learn throwing away previous LLM-generated data from the training set, letting through only the human-generated commit messages. N-n-nice! This is how the new technology's tail strikes you hard at the forehead when you think you're running up front. Cool! That's something to philosophise about!
hahah :)
so, we do not need to create commit messages manually anymore at all.. 🥂 great idea
That was my idea of like getting rid of manually coming up with a clever commit message yourself, i guess future developers will remember our generation as the last one who created commit messages manually :)
Any tedious, lenient process that can be automated, should be automated. Love this idea!
So, you commit with whatever message you want, and the Action rewrites your commits? Am I understanding that right?
If so, you then have to reset your local repo every time so you have the new commit messages and don't get merge conflicts.
That sounds incredibly complicated. Why not build it as a
prepare-commit-messagehook so it's done locally?it doesn't create any conflicts, you can check the demo :)
and well it's open source, so i would be extremely happy if you contribute your ideas, cause
prepare-commit-messageis a smart thing to implement as an optionBut you had to do a
git pull --rebasewhich, it would seem, wiped out the original commit, probably because it's now empty. If you'd done justgit pull, without the rebase, you'd have a conflict.All this rewriting of history after it's been pushed to a public remote repo seems pretty messy.
no bro, if you do
pull --no-rebaseit's same, no conflicts are there because opencommit doesn't change any code, only message. SHA becomes different, but git doesnt create any conflicts you would need to solve, because code is same.. all good :)Do your docs have any before and after graphic of how the Action changes the branch commits?
My first reaction was the same, that this would create a problem with my local branch being 1 commit ahead and behind the remote, but I don't think I understand what the Action is actually doing.
I hope I will try it someday) cool work!
Btw, Can you make this action as a GitHub hook for Husky for example? Or as a standalone app maybe. Is it possible to run it locally? Because we don't use GitHub and someone maybe doesn't use GitLab, etc. So it will be great to have some local solution
sure, you can set it up as a cli
npm i -g opencommitand then just runocoin any repo :)Ive Been doing this for a few weeks now but with gitlab merges instead. Doings a diff of the source and destination branch and getting GPT to list changes in each file, why it's done and a summary overall. Also asked for emoji's to make it more fun. Using GPT4, it's spitting out really great summaries that definitely improve the review process. Nice idea with opencommit!
thank you man :)