How to specify a git commit message template for a repository in a file at a relative path to the repository?

Question

Is there a way to specify a git commit.template that is relative to a repository?

For configuration an example is

$ git config commit.template $HOME/.gitmessage.txt 

But I would like to specify a template file relative to the .git folder of the repository.

Answer 1

This blog tipped me off that if the path to the template file is not absolute, then the path is considered to be relative to the repository root.

git config commit.template /absolute/path/to/file  or  git config commit.template relative-path-from-repository-root 

Answer 2

I used the prepare-commit-msg hook to solve this.

First create a file .git/commit-msg with the template of the commit message like

$ cat .git/commit-msg My Commit Template 

Next create a file .git/hooks/prepare-commit-msg with the contents

#!/bin/sh  firstLine=$(head -n1 $1)  if [ -z "$firstLine"  ] ;then     commitTemplate=$(cat `git rev-parse --git-dir`/commit-msg)     echo -e "$commitTemplate\n $(cat $1)" > $1 fi 

Mark the newly-created file as executable:

chmod +x .git/hooks/prepare-commit-msg 

This sets the commit message to the contents of the template.