Why use Conventional Commits?¶

Conventional Commits is a specification designed to introduce human and machine-readable meaning to commit messages, enabling automated tooling such as Uplift for managing releases. A user prefixes their commit with a type to describe their intent, and these labels form a direct relationship with Semantic Versioning. The specification adopts the Angular convention, and so does Uplift.

Semantic Versioning Types¶

• fix: A bug fix triggers a patch semantic version bump 0.1.0 ~> 0.1.1
• feat: A new feature triggers a minor semantic version bump 0.1.0 ~> 0.2.0
• feat!: A breaking change triggers a major semantic version bump 0.1.0 ~> 1.0.0¹

Additional Angular Types¶

Uplift supports all the additional Angular types, chore:, ci:, docs:, style:, refactor:, perf: and test:.

How Uplift Scans Commits¶

When determining the next semantic version, all commit messages for a release are scanned for the highest possible increment (Patch, Minor or Major).

docs: add documentation for new exciting feature
ci: build and test documentation within pipeline
feat: shiny new feature                           <-- largest increment
fix: fixed another bug found by user
fix: fixed bug found by user

In the above example, if the latest tag were 0.1.0 it would be incremented to 0.2.0.