August 23, 2024

Accelerate your pull request descriptions with your commits

When you are working on a feature or a bug fix, you usually create a branch, make some changes, and then create a pull request. The pull request description is a crucial part of the process. It should explain what the changes are, why they are needed, and how they were implemented.

Writing a good pull request description can be time-consuming, especially if you have made many changes. But there is a small trick that can help you accelerate this process: use your commits as a base for the pull request description.

When you have an already well implemented workflow, your commits probably looks like this:

feat(MyComponent): add a new feature to register users
fix(MyOtherComponent): fix a bug that was causing the app to crash when the user tried to login

Each commit message is a small description of what was done. You can use these messages as a base for your pull request description. You can copy them directly or use them as a starting point to write a more detailed description.

You can use the following script to generate a pull request description based on your commits:

git log main..HEAD --pretty=format:%s --reverse | pbcopy

Change main to the branch you want to compare your current branch to. This script will copy the commit messages to your clipboard. You can then paste them into the pull request description.