Configuration

Commitlint can be configured in many ways. You can use the default configuration or you can specify your own configuration file.

Default configuration

If you don’t specify any configuration file and you don’t have any commitlint configuration files in your environment, the CLI will use the default configurations of each rules.

See the default rules page for details.

Location

Commitlint will look for configuration in the following places.

Default

If no flag (see next section) is specified, the Commitlint will look for configuration in the following places in the current working directory:

• .commitlintrc (JSON or YAML file)
• .commitlintrc.json (JSON file)
• .commitlintrc.yml (YAML file)
• .commitlintrc.yaml (YAML file)

Tip

Note that it is searched in the order written above and the first one found is loaded. Therefore, if you have .commitlintrc and .commitlintrc.yml in the same directory, the .commitlintrc will be loaded and the second one will be ignored.

Using the flag

Configuration file can be specified by using the --config flag or the short -g flag.

# Using --config flag
$ commitlint --config path/to/.commitlintrc.yml

# Using -g flag
$ commitlint -g path/to/.commitlintrc.yml

If you specify a file and the file is not found, Commitlint will throw an error.

Debug configuration

You can use the --print-config flag to print the configuration that will be used by Commitlint.

$ commitlint --print-config
rules:
  description-empty: # Description must not be empty
    level: warning
  subject-empty: # Subject line must not be empty
    level: error
  type-empty: # Type must not be empty
    level: error