@wellmade/commitlint-config

Conventional Commits with a minimal set of additional lint rules to keep git log --oneline tidy, without locking you into Wellmade's own scope vocabulary or rejecting subjects that contain proper nouns / acronyms.

Install

npm install --save-dev @commitlint/cli @wellmade/commitlint-config

// commitlint.config.js
export default { extends: ['@wellmade/commitlint-config'] };

If you use husky:

echo 'npx --no-install commitlint --edit "$1"' > .husky/commit-msg
chmod +x .husky/commit-msg

What's enforced

| Rule | Level | Effect | | --------------------------------- | ----- | ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | @commitlint/config-conventional | error | The full Conventional Commits baseline (type-enum, subject-empty, etc.). | | header-max-length: 100 | error | Keeps git log --oneline readable. | | body-leading-blank | error | Blank line between subject and body. | | footer-leading-blank | warn | Blank line between body and footer. Warning, not error — see note below. |

Why no subject-case rule?

Earlier versions enforced ['sentence-case', 'lower-case'] on subjects to catch AI-generated Title Case Subject Line spam. In practice the rule misfired constantly on proper nouns and acronyms (Rekor, PascalCase, NestJS, TypeScript, JSON) and the Conventional-Commits type prefix (feat:, chore:) already signals intentionality. Real-world subjects need uppercase. PR review catches the AI-spam case well enough.

If your team wants the strict version back, add it to your own config:

'subject-case': [2, 'always', ['sentence-case', 'lower-case']]

Note on footer-leading-blank

Commitlint's conventional-changelog parser treats any blank line in the body as the body→footer boundary, then complains that the trailing footer line (e.g. Co-Authored-By:) is missing its leading blank. This mis-fires on perfectly valid markdown commit bodies that group bullets with blank lines, e.g.:

chore: cleanup

- group 1, line 1
- group 1, line 2

- group 2, line 1
- group 2, line 2

Co-Authored-By: someone <[email protected]>

That message is well-formed Conventional Commits but the parser rejects it. Demoting footer-leading-blank to warning keeps the signal without blocking the commit. The workaround for the warning itself is to keep the body to a single paragraph (no blank line between bullet groups).

Scopes

This config does not enforce a scope-enum rule by default. You can use any scope (or no scope) in your commit messages.

If your project wants to lock scopes to an allow-list — typically your service or module names — add scope-enum in your own config:

// commitlint.config.js
export default {
  extends: ['@wellmade/commitlint-config'],
  rules: {
    'scope-enum': [2, 'always', ['api', 'dashboard', 'deps', 'ci', 'docs']],
  },
};

Inside Wellmade's own toolchain repos (this one included), the equivalent rule is opted into per-repo so the cross-cutting package-name scopes (eslint-config, bedrock, etc.) are enforced only where they matter, not pushed onto every consumer.