Pre-Commit Usage
How to use pre-commit on the project
Table of contents
Context
Pre-commit is a python package that enables projects to specifies a list of hooks to run before a commit is made (a pre-commit hook). This is really useful to enforce standards or conventions, as it prevents non conformant changes from getting committed.
On this project, we use pre-commit to automate several checks, including:
- running a code formatting check based on prettier
- checking for large files typically not desired to keep in source control
- scanning for secret material, such as AWS keys
Aside from these checks being run prior to any commit being pushed, they are also run by a GitHub Actions workflow when a pull request is made.
Installation
Good news! If you completed onboarding and ran the workspace setup script, pre-commit should already be installed on your machine.
You can test that it’s installed by running pre-commit -V in a terminal window. If you get a nominal return including a version number, you’re all set. If the pre-commit command is not found, please refer back to the Onboarding / Workspace Setup section of this site. If pre-commit is not installed it is important to get it installed and setup on your machine. This is a part of the workflow for developing apps in this architecture. Luckily setup is simple.
Configuration
Although pre-commit is installed on your workstation, you must configure pre-commit to run for a given repository before it will begin blocking bad commits.
This procedure needs to only be run once per repository, or once each time the .pre-commit-config.yaml file is changed in the repository (very infrequently).
- open a terminal
- install all hooks configured in .pre-commit-config.yaml
cd macpro-base-template pre-commit install -a
That’s it – after running the above commands inside the project repository, pre-comit will run the project’s configured checks before any commit.