Attaching Jira issues to commit

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The place I work at requires Jira story ID and task ID attached to the commit body. Initially, I was attaching the ID to the commit body manually, by checking either my previous commit or opening up the Jira board, however, after working some hours I was easily forgetting to attach the IDs to the commit and getting annoying having to either reword them and perhaps having to lookup Jira again.

This was tedious and frustrating, so I wrote a Git hook using pre-commit to handle and install the hook. Our workflow requires the task ID to be attached to the branch same, like so: SKYR-123_branch-description, so Jira is capable of logging commits related to task branches¹. This makes it easy for the hook to know which task are you working on before writing to the commit body. As it checks whether you are in a task branch or any other branch. The Jira ID branch is configurable by specifying a regex for the Jira ID, like so: SKYR-\d+.

Git provides a pre-commit-msg hook, which prepares the default commit message before prompting the user for the commit description/body. To allow extensibility, the hook handles custom Git template with Jinja, so each project may have a custom commit template.

For example, the following template will write the task ID, story ID (if any) and task description.

Task description: {{ summary }}
Jira task ID: {{ key }}
{% if parent__key %}Jira story ID: {{ parent__key }}{% endif %}

The fields are related to Jira’s REST fields. Inner fields such as parent.key should replace the dot (.) with a double underscore (__).

I named the project GJira , as of Git-Jira.