Random Coding

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Automatically Adding a Jira Ticket ID to a Github Commit

We use Jira at work to track tasks. So, anytime you make changes to code, the commit message usually includes the ticket ID in the message.

It goes something like this:

[ISSUE-123] I understand that it's an antipattern, but it's convenient.

This is useful when you're looking at a busy repository and going through the history to find a specific commit.

Drawn comic of a commit log that shows person slowling adding less details to the commit log Top quality commit history /s Photo by XKCD

Of course, you can add this manually every time you commit. Or you can add this tiny script as a Github pre-commit hook so that it's automatically added.

#!/bin/bash

# This way you can customize which branches should be skipped when
# prepending commit message.
if [ -z "$BRANCHES_TO_SKIP" ]; then
  BRANCHES_TO_SKIP=(master)
fi

BRANCH_NAME=$(git symbolic-ref --short HEAD)

ISSUE_NUMBER=$(printf "${BRANCH_NAME}" | sed -n
's/.*\(ISSUE-[0-9]*\).*$/\1/p')
ISSUE_NUMBER="${ISSUE_NUMBER##*/}" # Strip out everything except ID

BRANCH_EXCLUDED=$(printf "%s\n" "${BRANCHES_TO_SKIP[@]}" | grep -c
"^$BRANCH_NAME$")
ISSUE_NUMBER_IN_COMMIT=$(grep -c "\[$ISSUE_NUMBER\]" $1)

if [ -n "$BRANCH_NAME" ] && ! [[ $BRANCH_EXCLUDED -eq 1 ]] && ! [[
$ISSUE_NUMBER_IN_COMMIT -ge 1 ]]; then
  sed -i.bak -e "1s/^/[$ISSUE_NUMBER] /" $1
fi

To use this script:

  1. Navigate to your <repository>/.git/hooks/
  2. Create a file named prepare-commit-msg and put the script inside it
  3. Make it executable by running chmod +x prepare-commit-msg

Now, you might have noticed that the regex specifically looks for the word ISSUE in the branch name. That's because it's the project code that we work with. You can simply adjust it to match the naming scheme of your project.

I'm not any good at scripting so I just cobbled this together using chatGPT. There are plenty of options that will let you automate this. Find one that fits your workflow and go nuts!

I got 99 problems ... I got 99 problems ...