Git Workflow Etiquettes

In the previous article, we discussed Forking Workflow in Open Source Ecosystem and how that workflow can help in resolving any issues that may arise at the time of Contributing to Open Source Projects. But along with those steps in the workflow, it is important that you follow a proper naming convention for your commit messages, branch names, or Pull Request titles, thus having these proper etiquettes can help you level up your contributions and make other maintainers easier to evaluate your work.

Naming conventions for Branches

Your branch name syntax can be similar to something like this:

name/issue#/description

Here name may be Your Github Id or your initial name, issue denotes the issue number and a very short description about the branch

Example: 

dora/45/new-feature

You can also consider this naming convention:

A. If it’s a new feature

feature/name/issue#    

B. If branch is for fixing new bug

bug/name/issue#                

Example:

new-footer/dora/251

Etiquettes for Git Commit Messages

Having proper commit messages helps in increasing the readability of git logs and file history. One may consider naming your commit messages in the following categories:

• feat – If you work on a new feature
• fix – If your code changes help in fixing some bug
• docs – Documentation related changes
• style – Changes related to formatting
• refactor – If changes are related to just restructuring the codebase
• test – If new tests are added or old tests are modified
• chore – Regular maintainer changes, for example, documentation generation, versioning, build processing, etc

Example: 

feat: New xyz component added

docs: Updated broken blog page link

You can also make more accurate commit messages by mentioning the scope of files:

type(scope): Message

Here, type includes various categories that are discussed above, for example, feat, bug, docs, etc
Scope – represents the place where the code changes are made, for example, file-names

Example:

chore(netlify): Redirected old models

Pull Request Guidelines

When Opening a Pull Request, do consider adding the following points in the message

• Issue number – Issue the PR may close
• Changes –  Write in detail about the new changes you made
• Related Issue/PR’s – Link all the related issues and pull request

Example:

# Closes #412 

# Changes

- Change 1
- Change 2

# Related Issues:
- Issue #410
- PR #387

Here, Closes #412 will indicate to Github that merging this PR will close the issue numbered 412 successfully and Changes can be listed out with the bullets for increasing readability.