How to perform an automatic commit with predefined message using Magit?

Question

I have a repository of org files which I mostly use for note taking and tracking, and I track it using git. I want to add a shortcut that would quickly commit all current content of the repository (both changed, new and deleted files) as a new commit with a predefined commit message (say "update"). How can I achieve this programmatically with magit?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

There are two parts to this task.

1. Figuring out how to do this on the command line.

   $ git add .
   $ git commit -m "the message"
   

2. Figuring out what Magit functions can be used to call Git commands.

   You can either use commands or you can use low-level functions. I would recommend doing the latter, but looking at the definitions of the former might help locating the latter. The manual section named Calling Git would also come in handy.

   Looking at that page you will learn that you should probably use magit-call-git and/or magit-run-git. The difference is that the latter also refreshes the current Magit buffer and the status buffer and doing that twice would be wasteful. So either use each function once or the latter twice and call magit-refresh explicitly.

   (magit-call-git "add" ".")
   (magit-call-git "commit" "-m" "the message")
   (magit-refresh)
   

Now wrap that in a command and bind a key to it. You might even want to add the command to the commit popup by Customizing [this] Existing Popup.