Enforce Naming Commit Messages with Visual Studio Team Services

[Nathan Gallenson]

I see some help pages on here asking for something similar, but I can't seem to find anything regarding enforcing Jira IDs in Visual Studio Team Services in Git mode's commit messages.  Has anyone attempted to enforce that when utilizing a tool like Jira Git Integration?  Yet Another Commit Checker seems to only support BitBucket.  Ideas?

Thanks!

[Mark L. Smith · Accepted solution]

Hi Nathan,

If you're using TFS on-premises, there's an option for deploying an add-in to do this. You can also do the enforcement on the client side as well.

The thing that doesn't have an option available is to do this on the Visual Studio Team Services online --- there's no hook or API support for failing a commit because it doesn't meet pre-conditions.

Is TFS on-premises OR client side enforcement an option for you?

[Nathan Gallenson]

We are using on-premise TFS. Both your suggestions sound like they could be viable.  

[Mark L. Smith]

So there's two levels of checking that can be done...

There's a real check where the issue must really exist and the Jira API is checked to make sure.

What a lot of people do is just check the message to see if it's likely it has a Jira issue referenced: ABC-1234 (even if ABC-1234 isn't a real Jira issue). The advantage to that is there is no API check, so you don't get into Jira credentials or Jira problems causing TFS to fail commits.

[Nathan Gallenson]

I see.  Well, at the very least, that's a good start. Any links to tutorials/documentation covering that functionality? 

[Mark L. Smith]

Here's the client side hook solution. 

Here's the TFS server side solution.

[Nathan Gallenson]

Perfect. Thank you kindly.