Conventional Branch

Conventional Branch" is a tool designed to help standardize branch names in Git for teams working on large projects. The extension allows you to choose from several pre-defined templates, which can be customized to suit your team's specific needs. Once a template is selected, you can easily create new branches with standardized names directly from your IDE. This helps to avoid confusion and promote consistency in branch naming conventions across the team. With "Conventional Branch", you can spend less time thinking about branch names and more time focusing on your work.

Usage

You can access VSCode Conventional Branch by using Command + Shift + P or Ctrl + Shift + P, enter Conventional Branch, and press Enter.

How to Customize Branch Name Template

Got to User Settings > Conventionl Branch > format You can change the default format and keep in mind that these are reserved keywords in this template: Branch, TicketNumber and Type.

Examples of templates:

• {Author}/{Type}/JIRA-{TicketNumber}/{Branch}
• myGithubUserName/Trello-{IssueNumber}/{Branch}
• {Type}/{Branch}

How to add Conventional Branch setting to your Workspace Settings

In .vscode > settings.json you can use conventional branch settings.

{
  "conventional-branch.format": "{Author}/{Type}/JIRA-{TicketNumber}/{Branch}",
  "conventional-branch.type": ["feature", "fix", "hotfix"],
  "conventional-branch.branchNameSeparator": "-",
  "conventional-branch.maxBranchNameLength": 50,
  "conventional-branch.minBranchNameLength": 5,
  "conventional-branch.forceBranchNameLowerCase": true,
  "conventional-branch.removeBranchNameWhiteSpace": true
}

Features

Base thing we are using is a format which is by default:

{Type}/{TicketNumber}/{Branch}

Selector Fields

Selector Fields are the fields that you can select from the dropdown. Use Brackets for defining the selector fields. For example:{MyType[A,B,C]}/JIRA-{TicketNumber} will create a dropdown for MyType with options A, B and C.

Reserved Keywords: Type, Branch

Type

It is a special name. It is an enum that contains different types of branch like feat, bug and some other options(you can change it via settings).

Branch

It is also something special. It is the branch name. By default some operations are enabled for branch name. For example we are removing the whitespaces. Or we are converting the text to lower case. These are customaizable options.

Force Parent Branch

Sometimes you want to be sure that every branch you are making with the extension are from specific parent. For example staging branch.

For this you can use this setting: forcedParentBranch:

{
 "conventional-branch.forcedParentBranch":  'staging'
}

Common Format Samples

The most commont one I found is this one: {Type}/{TicketNumber}-{Branch}

Many code bases are using this format to add ticket number to the branch and at the same time also have a short description for the branch.

Extension Settings