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One policy file for your Git history

Most teams have a wiki page titled something like "How we write commit messages." It covers commit conventions, branch naming, sign-offs, and author email consistency — and then nobody reads it.

Commit Check exists to turn that wiki page into something Git actually enforces.

A policy engine, not a linter

Commit Check is a lightweight policy engine for Git metadata — the parts of a commit that live around your code rather than inside it:

  • Commit messages — Conventional Commits, subject length, imperative mood
  • Branch names — Conventional Branch types like feature/, bugfix/, release/
  • Author identity — name and email consistency
  • Sign-off trailers — Signed-off-by for DCO workflows
  • Push safety — catch accidental force-pushes before they rewrite history

That word — policy — matters. Instead of scattering rules across a CI script, a pre-commit hook, and a stale convention doc, you write them once in a versioned cchk.toml.

Write it once, enforce it everywhere

That single policy file is read by every enforcement point:

pip install commit-check
commit-check --message --branch

The same cchk.toml then drives:

  • the CLI for local one-off checks,
  • pre-commit hooks so problems are caught before a commit lands,
  • CI / GitHub Actions so pull requests are validated for the whole team.

Because the policy is committed alongside your code, it is reviewed, diffed, and versioned like everything else. When the rules change, the change shows up in a pull request.

Zero configuration to start

You do not need a config file to begin. With no cchk.toml, Commit Check applies lenient, sensible defaults: commit messages should follow Conventional Commits and branch names should follow the Conventional Branch convention. That is enough to get value on day one.

echo "feat: add streaming support" | commit-check -m

When you need stricter rules — a maximum subject length, required sign-off, or an allow-list of commit types — add a cchk.toml. The next post walks through the details.

Add the badge

Once Commit Check is guarding your repository, let people know:

[![commit-check](https://img.shields.io/badge/commit--check-enabled-brightgreen?logo=Git&logoColor=white&color=%232c9ccd)](https://github.com/commit-check/commit-check)

Where to go next

Clean commits. Clear standards. One policy file.