Vcs tips

This note has some useful Version Control System (VCS) tips.

Picking a license

Use https://choosealicense.com/. This website explains in simple language what are the permissions, conditions, and limitations of each license, and also has a handy button to automatically generate a pull request for the creation of the license. It's handy if the license wasn't picked at the generation of the project.

Generating a python dependency list

Run the following line to automatically generate a list of all installed python packages and output it into requirements.txt:

1pip freeze > requirements.txt

Note that this outputs every single python package on the environment, therefore it should only be used if you are using a virtual environment specialized for the project.

Generating a gitignore file

Use https://www.toptal.com/developers/gitignore. The purpose of .gitignore files is to ensure that certain files not tracked by Git remain untracked. This website allows the automatic generation of .gitignore files, through specification of Operating Systems, IDEs and Programming languages. Command line usage and some editor extensions are also available, see docs.

Commit messages

See The Conventional Commits specification.