Making Commits and Writing Good Messages

Your First Commit

A commit is a permanent snapshot of your staged changes. Each commit has a unique SHA-1 hash, an author, a timestamp, and a message.

git commit -m 'add homepage HTML structure'
git commit                   # opens your editor for a multi-line message

The Anatomy of a Good Commit Message

A well-written message saves your future self and your teammates enormous time. Follow the seven-rule style used by most open-source projects and teams like CPCODELAB:

1. Subject line: 50 characters or fewer, imperative mood ("fix", "add", "remove").
2. Blank line separating subject from body.
3. Body: explain *why*, not *what*. The diff already shows what changed.
4. Wrap body at 72 characters.
5. Reference issues when relevant: closes #42.

fix: validate email before saving to database

The previous code accepted any string as an email address,
causing silent failures when sending confirmation emails.
Added a regex check and return a 400 if validation fails.

Closes #17

Common Prefixes (Conventional Commits)

• feat: — a new feature
• fix: — a bug fix
• docs: — documentation only
• refactor: — code change that neither fixes a bug nor adds a feature
• chore: — build process, tooling changes