Git Commit Helper

Overview

Git Commit Helper is a practical tool that leverages large language models (LLMs) to analyze changes in a Git repository. It helps users generate meaningful commit messages, addressing the difficulties users may encounter when writing commit messages. At the same time, it provides a user - friendly command - line interaction experience.

Preview

You can use the git-commit-helper command directly to generate meaningful commit messages. Additionally, you can also use it within lazygit to quickly submit commits. Here is a preview video of using git-commit-helper in lazygit.

Install

You can either download the corresponding package released in the release section or use the following command to install:

cargo install git-commit-helper

Usage

This tool supports OpenAI, Anthropic, or Ollama as the language model provider.
Configure only one provider at a time.

Environment Variables

• For OpenAI (-p openai, the default):

  • OPENAI_API_KEY (Required)
  • OPENAI_BASE_URL (Optional, defaults to OpenAI's official endpoint)

• For Anthropic (-p anthropic):

  • ANTHROPIC_API_KEY (Required)
  • ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL (Optional, defaults to https://api.anthropic.com/v1)

• For Ollama (-p ollama):

  • OLLAMA_BASE_URL (Optional, defaults to http://localhost:11434)

When --model is omitted, a sensible default is chosen per provider (openai: gpt-4o, anthropic: claude-opus-4-8, ollama: llama3.2).

Large diffs

If a staged diff is larger than --chunk-size bytes (default 200000), it is split on file boundaries and each part is summarized separately before the commit message is generated. The parts are summarized concurrently, so large diffs stay fast.

Modern models have much larger context windows (e.g. Claude's 1M tokens), so if you use a long-context model you can raise --chunk-size to fit the whole diff in a single request and skip summarization entirely — often producing a more accurate message. The default is kept conservative so it stays within gpt-4o's context window out of the box.

Example Command

Use this tool after running git add:

Usage: git-commit-helper [OPTIONS]

Options:
  -p, --provider <PROVIDER>      [default: openai]  (openai | anthropic | ollama)
  -m, --model <MODEL>            [default: per-provider — see above]
      --gpgsign
      --gpgsignkey <GPGSIGNKEY>  [default: ]
      --max-token <MAX_TOKEN>    [default: 2048]
      --chunk-size <CHUNK_SIZE>  [default: 200000]
  -h, --help                     Print help
  -V, --version                  Print version

License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.

🙏 Support

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