Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) Sign Off

Basics

All contributors to Lyrion retain copyright to their work, but must only submit work which they have the rights to submit. See the Developer Certificate of Origin.

We require all contributors to acknowledge that they have the rights to the code they're contributing by signing their commits in git using a "DCO Sign Off".

To sign your work, pass the --signoff option to git commit:

git commit --signoff -m"my commit"

Or short:

git commit -s -m"my commit"

Similarly you can sign-off a git rebase:

git rebase --signoff master

This will add a line similar to the following at the end of your commit:

Signed-off-by: Jimi Bendix <[email protected]>

By signing off a commit you're stating that you confirm the Developer Certificate of Origin.

Github checks

When you submit a pull request on Github, there will be a check for the sign-off message. If you forget to add the message, the pull request will be blocked. You can amend the situation using the following command, followed by a force push:

git commit --amend --signoff

Commit message template

If you are too lazy to have to add the -s parameter on each and every commit, you can create a commit message template which includes the sign-off line. Create a simple text file, eg. ~/.gitmessage or [project's root].git/commitmessage with the following content:

Signed-off-by: Jimi Bendix <[email protected]>

If you want to enable this template for all your git activity, register it globally:

git config --global commit.template ~/.gitmessage

If you prefer to have individual versions per repository, or if you only want it in some repo, do similarly at the root of your repository clone:

git config commit.template .git/commitmessage