Commitlint

Last updated: Mar 5, 2026

Rationale

Commitlint  is the tool we use to standardize our commit messages and enforce compliance during CI/CD  tests. By using Commitlint, we achieve well-structured commit messages that

• follow a convention, and
• are readable for humans and machines.

The main reasons why we chose it over other alternatives are:

• It allows us to have a standardized commit history , greatly improving documentation on what each commit does from a high-level perspective while avoiding ending up with a messy commit history .
• It supports testing commit messages via CLI , allowing us to automate it as a CI job .
• As commit data is standardized, it allows us to run data analytics  on our commit history and answer questions like “What percentage of the commits in the last month were backend features?,” “How many developers worked on the front end of our application in the last month?”, among many others.
• It is open source .
• It is widely used by the community .
• It allows us to declare a syntax  based on our own needs.
• It supports many rules  that can be tuned based on our own needs.

Alternatives

git-commit-msg-linter : It has a much smaller ruleset . It is not as widely used by the community .

Usage

We use Commitlint  for linting  commit messages in our repository .