Conventional Commits
Conventional Commits are a formatting standard for commits in version control systems. They distinguishes code changes based on their purpose.
Specification
[edit]The standard defines the following format:
<type>[optional scope]: <description> [optional body] [optional footer(s)]
The specification defines only two classification types.[1]
Unspecified types are allowed,[1] for example, build, for changes to the building of the codebase, which is derived from Angular, and chore, for changes not affecting production code, which was introduced by Conventional Commits.[2]
History
[edit]The nature of managing open source software projects necessitates a structured way to interpret commits, and commit classification emerged as a way to improve software quality and maintainability.[3] Conventional Commits originates from the commit format of the Angular repository, and mostly inherits its classification types. While these projects were not the first to introduce classification to commit messages, unlike earlier systems, their classifications had a level of granularity not present in earlier systems, which allowed for deeper resulting analysis,[4] and were chosen to be mutually exclusive.[5]
Adoption
[edit]A 2025 study found that, of 381 randomly selected JavaScript projects on GitHub, 360 contained commits formatted according to Conventional Commits, and 198 of those had 80% or more of their commits formatted this way.[6] In projects that had not adopted Conventional Commits, 10% of commits adhered to the standard anyways.[7]
Notes
[edit]- 1 2 "Conventional Commits". Conventional Commits. Retrieved 2026-07-03.
- ↑ Kramer 2024, p. 13-14.
- ↑ Berciu et al. 2025, p. 841-842.
- ↑ Berciu et al. 2025, p. 842.
- ↑ Kramer 2024, p. 12-13.
- ↑ Kong et al. 2025, p. 111:6.
- ↑ Zeng et al. 2025, p. 2281.
References
[edit]- Kramer, Philipp (2 May 2024). Classification of Commit Characteristics by Code Changes (PDF) (MSc thesis).
- Berciu, Liviu-Marian; Motogna, Simona; Picus, Oskar; Molnar, Arthur-Jozsef (2025). "Exploring the relation between source code commit information and SonarQube issues". Procedia Computer Science. 270: 841–850. doi:10.1016/j.procs.2025.09.204.
- Zeng, Qunhong; Zhang, Yuxia; Qiu, Zhiqing; Liu, Hui (2025). A First Look at Conventional Commits Classification (PDF). 2025 IEEE/ACM 47th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). Ottawa, ON, Canada: IEEE. pp. 2277–2289. doi:10.1109/ICSE55347.2025.00011.
- Kong, Dezhen; Liu, Jiakun; Bao, Lingfeng; Lo, David (2025). "Toward Better Comprehension of Breaking Changes in the NPM Ecosystem". ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. 34 (4). New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery: 111:1–111:23. doi:10.1145/3702991.
External links
[edit]- "Conventional Commits 1.0.0". Conventional Commits. Retrieved 31 December 2025.