# Commit Message Conventions

### Guidelines

Writing good commit messages helps you and your teammates to track changes more effectively. The commit message should provide a good summary of the changes made.

Be specific

:x: - `bug fix`

:x: - `refactor`

:heavy\_check\_mark: - `Add null check to input parser`

:heavy\_check\_mark: - `Refactor navbar component for better readability`

#### Be concise

If you find it difficult to summarise your changes, consider splitting them into multiple commits. Try to group related changes together in commits for easier compartmentalisation.

### Conventions

While you may enter anything in the commit message, we strongly recommend sticking to some convention when creating your commit messages.

A common convention is:

First line: 80-character title, phrased imperatively

Then if your change is complex, elaborate on the change in prose.

```
Change greeting from "Hi" to "Hello"

"Hi" is a bit too informal for a greeting. We should change it to "Hello" instead,
so that our users don't feel like we are being too informal. Blah blah blah blah.
Blah blah.
```

Another convention is [Conventional Commits](https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0/):

```
feat: add button
fix: prevent text overflow
```

One bonus of this convention is that branches can be named similarly, e.g. (`feat/add-button)`.

You may also refer to CS2103/T (Software Engineering)'s conventions for naming: <https://se-education.org/guides/conventions/git.html>