Hmm good question. The init command needs to be improved to support this scenario. It is not currently a use-case that our tests cover. It certainly could be.

For now, as a manual workaround, you need to create an empty or boilerplate package.json in the root of your non-node project. If you want to do this using the cli then you can do something like npm init --yes followed by commitizen init cz-conventional-changelog --save --save-exact. The first command creates a boilerplate package.json and the second initializes commitizen.

I do expect that init will be rewritten as soon as I have some more time to devote to this project. I would be willing to help on an PRs that people want to contribute to improve the init command.

Please note that you can still use the rest of commitizen on non-node projects once you get the package.json created. This is just a limitation of the current init command.

Maybe creating a czfile in the root of project is better, just like gulpfile.js. The cz-cli could read both the config.commitizen from package.json and the content of czfile.

I'm seconding this, commitizen is the perfect fit for many non-Node projects as well.

@adoyle-h You can use a .czrc file.

.czrc file doesn't seem to work in the project root though. Even for node projects I would rather not pollute my package.json

+1 (x100) :)

This feature worked 6 months ago, somehow however in the last 6 months this feature disappeared. I use the following versions and because it still had this feature I could run commitizen without needing a package.json file.

npm install -g commitizen@2.8.6 cz-customizable@4.0.0

with those versions all I needed was a local .cz.json.js and .cz-config.js file in the root of the project, no unsightly package.json, and it all works great. All my projects have been halted on that version waiting for this features to come back, we may have to drop commitizen soon if that doesnt happen.

+1

Hey all. Haven't forgotten about you. We did remove the ability to use a .czrc file because our adapters are node-based and thus you have a node project even if your project isn't actually a node project. I am trying to learn more about what we can do to

A) have a sane config loading strategy
B) support you all

Any chance you all can just create a package.json file with only the information we need. What are the downsides of this?

Thanks for helping me to understand more!

You can use https://github.com/Woile/commitizen

To use commitizen without installing the commitizen in the repository or by using npm install -g commitizen (for some developers global dependencies binaries are not in their path. You can use npx --package=commitizen cz which will run the cz binary of the commitizen package.

With the following .czrc at the root of the project:

{
  "path": "cz-conventional-changelog"
}

It works perfectly.

If you are looking to use commitizen with husky you can use the following hook:

#!/usr/bin/env sh
. "$(dirname -- "$0")/_/husky.sh"

exec < /dev/tty && npx --package=commitizen cz --hook || true