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How to force Comments on SVN Commit

Tagged Under : Subversion

If you are using Subversion, you might have come across this issue. Multiple developers working on a set of files and committing them without any comments. If you decide to force comments on every commit, here is a little pre-commit hook script that will do the job. Just to be clear, a pre-commit script is fired when the user hits the ‘OK’ button on the commit dialog box.

This script would need to be under /{repository-location}/hooks/. There are some template scripts already in there and this one is probably a slight modification of one of those samples in there.

Here it is.

@echo off :: :: Stops commits that have empty log messages. :: @echo off setlocal rem Subversion sends through the path to the repository and transaction id set REPOS=%1 set TXN=%2 rem check for an empty log message svnlook log %REPOS% -t %TXN% | findstr . > nul if %errorlevel% gtr 0 (goto err) else exit 0 :err echo. 1>&2 echo Your commit has been blocked because you didn't give any log message 1>&2 echo Please write a log message describing the purpose of your changes and 1>&2 echo then try committing again. -- Thank you 1>&2 exit 1

| Posted by Anuj Gakhar in Subversion

Comments:

8 Responses to “How to force Comments on SVN Commit”

1. marc esher on 14 Feb 2008 at 2:48 pm #
   
   

   Thanks for the post, Anuj! This is exactly what I needed, when I needed it. Fate….
2. Anuj Gakhar on 14 Feb 2008 at 3:04 pm #
   
   

   Good to know that Marc. It takes time to get used to comment before commit but definitely useful in the long run or when you are looking at commit stats etc..
3. pin7 on 14 Feb 2008 at 3:30 pm #
   
   

   Great one!
   This is very usefull, thanks.
4. Lars Pohlmann on 18 Feb 2008 at 1:08 pm #
   
   

   thx. that’s really useful!
5. Jeroen Leenarts on 18 Feb 2008 at 1:47 pm #
   
   

   Here come the single dot “.” commit messages.

   In my opinion, nice, but not at all effective I’m afraid.
6. Anuj Gakhar on 18 Feb 2008 at 1:58 pm #
   
   

   @Jeroen, I agree to that. Rules are always broken and always will be. But that doesnt mean you dont apply rules. Its just one of those things.

   On a second thought, you could probably actually check the comment length and force atleast 5 or 10 characters. Havent tried but probably possible.
7. Luke Pearce on 24 Apr 2008 at 11:58 am #
   
   

   Works a charm - thanks for this.
8. Ryan Stille on 16 Jun 2008 at 7:32 pm #
   
   

   Might want to mention that this is for windows only. I started to copy and paste it and place it into my hooks directory, then noticed the echo, rem, etc. statements.