How do I validate a commit message using the executable instead of CaptainHook?

[hussainweb]

How do I validate a commit message using the executable instead of CaptainHook?

While working on #40, I realized that even if there is a PHAR, I can't use it to actually validate a commit message. These are the only commands I see on the executable and none of them help in validating a message.

  completion  Dump the shell completion script
  config      Configures options for creating Conventional Commits
  help        Display help for a command
  list        List commands
  prepare     Prepares a commit message conforming to Conventional Commits

I think there is a place for a new command validate that would do the job. I am happy to write a PR but I wanted to check if I have not missed something obvious here.

[ramsey]

How would a validate command work? Would you type in the commit message, or would you tell it a file where the commit message exists?

If you want to type in the commit message when you validate it, I think the prepare command works well for this.

[hussainweb]

Hmm... Yes, the commit message could come in via stdin. I must have missed that capability of prepare to validate commit messages. I'll look again.

[hussainweb]

I am not able to find anything relevant in the prepare command documentation. So, what I want to do is if the user has entered the commit message: "fix: some fix in module", conventional-commits should return exit code 0. I don't see any such explanation in the usage of the prepare command. Am I missing something?

❯ ./bin/conventional-commits.phar prepare --help
Description:
  Prepares a commit message conforming to Conventional Commits

Usage:
  prepare [options]

Options:
      --config=CONFIG   Path to a file containing Conventional Commits configuration
  -h, --help            Display help for the given command. When no command is given display help for the list command
  -q, --quiet           Do not output any message
  -V, --version         Display this application version
      --ansi|--no-ansi  Force (or disable --no-ansi) ANSI output
  -n, --no-interaction  Do not ask any interactive question
  -v|vv|vvv, --verbose  Increase the verbosity of messages: 1 for normal output, 2 for more verbose output and 3 for debug

Help:
  This command interactively helps prepare a commit message according to the Conventional Commits specification. For more information, see https://www.conventionalcommits.org.

[ramsey]

When you run the command, it walks the user through the prompts to create the commit message. The user enters each part of the message, which is validated.

[hussainweb]

Ah, that's not what I mean. I wanted to replicate the functionality provided by the ValidateConventionalCommit. That only works for CaptainHook right now but as I described originally, I wanted to make that available to GrumPHP. One easy way to do that is by making it available in the executable so that I can call it from GrumPHP. I had described this in the original post in #25.

[hussainweb]

In other words, what I am looking for is a way where I can pass a commit message string to conventional-commits and it would tell me if that is a valid commit message or not. As explained before, I couldn't find a way to do this with the CLI.

[ramsey]

I think I understand now. You would like to be able to pipe a message to a validate command on stdin—not have a user type it in from stdin.

There's currently no way to do this with the CLI, and I'm open to a PR for this. 😄

[hussainweb]

Awesome and thanks for the discussion. I'll work on a PR in the coming days.