Best practices for commit messages

As a general rule, “one change per commit, and one commit per change” is the way to keep your Git commits – and history – useful.

There are many situations where you might only work on one major change, but also add a few minor (unrelated) corrections and improvements to the code. These unrelated changes should generally be committed separately, though. It’s a good idea to keep individual commits focused on the one specific thing you are trying to accomplish: a minor fix, fixing a typo, changing style, adding a (single) feature, and so on. Even if you end up making multiple interrelated changes at once, it might still make sense to split them up into multiple commits later. Committing more frequently can make this process a lot easier.

There are many reasons for this rule. One of the most practical reasons is that when your commits are small, individual changes can be easily cherry-picked or reverted should...