commitlint

Commitlint

Validate commit messages against Conventional Commits format using commitlint configuration and rules.

When to Use This Skill

Use this skill when:

• Setting up commitlint for a repository
• Configuring commitlint rules and shareable configurations
• Integrating commitlint with pre-commit hooks or CI/CD pipelines
• Extracting rules from commitlint config to generate LLM prompts for commit message generation
• Validating commit messages programmatically
• Troubleshooting commitlint configuration or validation errors
• Understanding commitlint rule syntax and severity levels
• Detecting commitlint configuration files in a repository

Core Capabilities

Configuration Detection

Commitlint uses cosmiconfig to find configuration files in this priority order:

Dedicated config files:

.commitlintrc
.commitlintrc.json
.commitlintrc.yaml
.commitlintrc.yml
.commitlintrc.js
.commitlintrc.cjs
.commitlintrc.mjs
.commitlintrc.ts
.commitlintrc.cts
commitlint.config.js
commitlint.config.cjs
commitlint.config.mjs
commitlint.config.ts
commitlint.config.cts

Package files:

• package.json with commitlint field
• package.yaml (PNPM) with commitlint field

Configuration Formats

JavaScript ES Modules (Recommended):

// commitlint.config.js or commitlint.config.mjs
export default {
  extends: ['@commitlint/config-conventional'],
};

TypeScript:

// commitlint.config.ts
import type { UserConfig } from '@commitlint/types';
import { RuleConfigSeverity } from '@commitlint/types';

const config: UserConfig = {
  extends: ['@commitlint/config-conventional'],
  rules: {
    'type-enum': [RuleConfigSeverity.Error, 'always', ['feat', 'fix', 'docs']],
  },
};

export default config;

JSON:

{
  "extends": ["@commitlint/config-conventional"]
}

YAML:

extends:
  - "@commitlint/config-conventional"

Rule Configuration

Rules are configured as arrays: [level, applicability, value]