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Using gitlint in a CI environment

By default, when just running gitlint without additional parameters, gitlint lints the last commit in the current working directory.

This makes it easy to use gitlint in a CI environment (Jenkins, TravisCI, Github Actions, pre-commit, CircleCI, Gitlab, etc). In fact, this is exactly what we do ourselves: on every commit, we run gitlint as part of our CI checks. This will cause the build to fail when we submit a bad commit message.

Alternatively, gitlint will also lint any commit message that you feed it via stdin like so: 

# lint the last commit message
git log -1 --pretty=%B | gitlint # (1)
# lint a specific commit: 62c0519
git log -1 --pretty=%B 62c0519 | gitlint

  1. Gitlint requires that you specify --pretty=%B (=only print the log message, not the metadata), future versions of gitlint might fix this and not require the --pretty argument.

It's also possible to lint more than one commit at once.