GPT Commit Message Generator

This program is a commit message generator that leverages GPT-4 or GPT-3.5-turbo to create detailed and informative commit messages for your source control.

Requirements

• Python 3
• openai
• tiktoken
• An OpenAI API key

Installation

1. Install the program:

pip3 install gpt-commit-msg

2. Set your OpenAI API key as an environment variable:

export OPENAI_API_KEY="your_openai_api_key"

Usage

The program can be run in two ways:

1. Piping a diff into the script:

diff -u old_file new_file | gpt-commit-msg

2. Using the --git flag to automatically use staged git changes:

gpt-commit-msg --git

By default, the script uses GPT-3.5-turbo, which is faster and costs less. To use GPT-4 instead, add the -4 flag:

gpt-commit-msg -4

How It Works

The script reads a diff from either stdin or staged git changes, and then creates a commit message using OpenAI's GPT. It handles large diffs by splitting and summarizing the input until it fits within the model's token limit.

The generated commit message will start with a one-line summary of 60 characters, followed by a blank line, and then a longer but concise description of the changes.

Editor Integration

Vim

I use the following two macros in my .vimrc to easily invoke this command when writing a commit message.

command! CommitMsg :r !gpt-commit-msg --git
command! CommitMsg4 :r !gpt-commit-msg --git -4

Notes

Every change description in this project's history also came courtesy of this script.