✍️ CommitScribe - AI-Powered Commit Message Rewriting

CommitScribe is an Azure DevOps pipeline task that uses AI to automatically format and describe your commits. It supports multiple AI providers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Azure OpenAI.

The commit message and git diff are passed to the AI provider, which generates a new commit message based on the provided context. The new commit message is then used to update the commit message in the repository.

📦 Setup

Install the extension from the Visual Studio Marketplace
Configure your AI provider credentials:
- Create a pipeline variable or variable group with your AI provider API key
- Mark the variable as secret

📋 Prerequisites

Ensure your pipeline has a checkout step with persistCredentials enabled & fetchDepth set to 0:

steps:
    - checkout: self
      fetchDepth: "0" # IMPORTANT: otherwise, the diff will be ALL files in the repo
      persistCredentials: true

Configure Git identity in your pipeline before the CommitScribe task:

steps:
    - script: |
          git config --global user.email "azure-pipelines@example.com"
          git config --global user.name "Azure Pipelines"
      displayName: "Configure Git"

Grant repository permissions:
- For Azure Repos: Grant the build service account 'Contribute' permissions
- For GitHub repos: Configure GitHub service connection with write permissions
- For other Git providers: Ensure the pipeline's service account has write access

🛠️ Basic Usage

Add the task to your pipeline:

steps:
    - checkout: self
      fetchDepth: "0"
      persistCredentials: true
    - script: |
          git config --global user.email "azure-pipelines@example.com"
          git config --global user.name "Azure Pipelines"
      displayName: "Configure Git"
    - task: commitscribe@0
      inputs:
          aiprovider: "openai" # Options: openai, anthropic, azure
          aiproviderkey: "$(YOUR_API_KEY)"

⚙️ Configuration Options

Input	Required	Default	Description
`aiprovider`	Yes	`openai`	AI provider (OpenAI, Anthropic, or Azure OpenAI)
`aiproviderkey`	Yes	-	API key for the selected provider
`model`	No	Provider-specific	Model to use (`gpt-4` for OpenAI, `claude-3-sonnet-20240229` for Anthropic)
`azendpoint`	No*	-	Azure OpenAI endpoint URL (*Required for Azure)
`systempromptoverride`	No	-	Override the default system prompt
`projectspecificcontext`	No	-	Additional project context for better results
`maxtokens`	No	2000	Maximum tokens for API requests
`recurse`	No	false	Process commits recursively until [commitscribe_signoff]

[!WARNING] The recurse flag will parse your entire commit history and rewrite every commit message until it finds a commit message that contains [commitscribe_signoff]. This is useful for updating commit messages in bulk, but it can be dangerous if you're not careful. Use with caution!

🪄 Examples

OpenAI Configuration

- task: commitscribe@0
  inputs:
      aiprovider: "openai"
      aiproviderkey: "$(OPENAI_API_KEY)"
      model: "gpt-4"

Anthropic Configuration

- task: commitscribe@0
  inputs:
      aiprovider: "anthropic"
      aiproviderkey: "$(ANTHROPIC_API_KEY)"
      model: "claude-3-sonnet-20240229"

Azure OpenAI Configuration

- task: commitscribe@0
  inputs:
      aiprovider: "azure"
      aiproviderkey: "$(AZURE_OPENAI_KEY)"
      azendpoint: "https://your-resource.openai.azure.com/"
      model: "your-deployment-name"

✅ Best Practices

Always store API keys as secret variables
Use projectspecificcontext to provide domain-specific knowledge
Set appropriate maxtokens for your commit message size

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please open an issue or submit a pull request.

CommitScribe

Scott McKendry