Setting up commitlint and husky with a new project

This guide will go though how to setup husky version 6+ with commitlint version 12+. Husky allows for running scripts throughout the lifecycle of git, whereas commitlint allows you to add rules to format your commits by convention. Earlier versions require setting up configuration through package.json, however with the latest version of husky this is deprecated.

Create a new folder and change directory into it.

mkdir project
cd project

Initialise the folder with npm, to create a package.json and initialise git.

npm init -y
git init

Create a .gitignore file and add the following to it, such that node_modules folder is not included in version history.

node_modules

Stage and commit everything done so far.

git add .
git commit -m "initial"

Install the following dependencies as dev dependencies with –save-dev flag.

npm install --save-dev @commitlint/config-conventional @commitlint/cli husky

The following command will install husky config under .husky directory. By default this command creates pre-commit file, In this example I renamed it to commit-msg in order to lint my commit messages.

npx husky install
npx husky-init

Following that I attempted to commit a bad commit message. The following error showed, Please add rules to your commitlint.config.js

Add the following to commitlint.config.js, which will extend the configuration from the package installed earlier.

After doing so, the same bad commit message will still fail, but now shows the correct linting warning. Now you can prefix with a relevant type such as feat: my message or chore: my message and the commit will succeed.