Show HN: GetHooky – a language-agnostic Git hook manager | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: GetHooky – a language-agnostic Git hook manager

ezpieco.github.io

26 pointsEzpie21 comments

No support for arm64 unfortunately :( OP, I tried installing via rosetta on macOS arm:

   arch -x86_64 sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ezpieco/gethooky/master/tools/install.sh)"

And I get the following error:

   mv: fastcopy: open() failed (to): /usr/bin/hooky: Operation not permitted

I curl'd and installed the x86 version manually into my ~/.zsh_scripts folder to get past this; I think for darwin clients you need to install to /usr/local/bin to get past perms errors (maybe just for arm macs?).

There's always a spectrum of preference with these things. Personally I don't like git hooks for my workflows because I know CI will enforce the relevant checks. In addition, I am fine running an extra test or lint or build command before opening my PR to verify it works locally. Git hooks are a nice solution but for me they just slow down common operations so I'd rather not use them. This tool looks like a nice improvement over project-level configurations like Husky (in the npm space) because it's an individual configuration so I could just skip it, whereas husky gets configured for everyone.

There are dozens of your type out there that I don’t understand. The “I don’t want no commit hooks running on my machine. I and only I control what happens on my local machine” purists. There’s at least one in every job I work.

If the thing is going to block in ci anyway, why are you opting for a push and pray approach? Why arbitrarily increase your feedback loop time and add waiting time for each loop in ci? Chances are the time to get feedback is at least a couple orders of magnitude faster locally, you’re paying not only the startup time to register the runner and bring it online, get dependencies installed etc but also the manual time to context switch to the CI window etc. Just do all your linting and auto formatting and whatever on commit. It’s all work you’re going to have to do anyway, why introduce some extra less efficient step on yourself to slow yourself down?

Valid questions. For me it's two things:

1) sometimes hooks are configured on commit, and I prefer to have a very quick and lightweight commit action. If I'm changing branches sometimes I'll commit WIP changes so I can easily come back to it later. I know git stash accomplishes a very similar functionality but it's just a preferred workflow.

2) I don't like the feedback I get from git hooks when committing in the VS Code interface. For example, we have a "lint" hook that runs on pre-push. When it fails, I have to run "lint" manually in my terminal anyway to actually see the errors, because VS Code doesn't show me the actual errors. I believe the hook results are available in some other tab or something but I haven't bothered to learn it.

Both of these are just personal preferences, and maybe a little bit of resistance to learning new workflows. I don't consider myself a purist about it and I've never argued about it at work but hopefully this sheds a little light on my perspective.

Edit: regarding the "push and pray" approach, I personally don't do that, I'll run it locally first, I just prefer to run it myself rather than via a hook.

I can totally understand the point you're making there. I used to use VScode too few years ago, but now I use vim most of the time. So majority of the time I'm in my terminal so if the hook fails for me, it gives me the error, and I have zero problems with that. So I get what you mean there, but I mean, for those who live in their terminals git hooks kind of make sense, I mean after all, we see the error cause its the terminal after all.

So yeah it just boils down to the fact how you would use git, in vscode, hooks aren't great, cause its not going to display the error, but if you use the terminal, even in vscode, you'll see the error getting displayed on the terminal.

1) You can pass `--no-verify` to `git commit` and it will skip the hooks. An alias would make it even more ergonomic.

2) You can write hooks that make the changes for you where possible. This is what I do for lints from auto-formatters. Don't know how to handle the rest of your VS Code issues though.

Unfortunately —-no-verify is all or nothing. If I have 10 hooks and only want to skip one of them it won’t do the job

maybe git should fix this. Or maybe I could fix this internally in githooky maybe? I don't know, but I could give it a try, at least. How would you like the approach to be? Any ideas, I'll take it.

A naïve stab at the UX is to exclude the name of the hook(s) you want to skip in the command line via a flag. Then you can also provide a configuration that will skip it in a file as well that the command line option overrides - good for people who want to skip for longer periods and don't want to type it out.

Honestly, I like the idea. I'll add it in a later release, but if you want you can also do a PR on github https://github.com/ezpieco/gethooky

I have no issues in accepting PRs it would be cool to see how you can cook this up.

Yeah it seems a lot of this boils down to the myriad of ways people use git. I can imagine some ways are easier than others when using hooks. And githooks are “all or nothing” without an easy way to enable/disable them per hook - which I believe is one of the problems that OP aims to solve.

Why would someone use this tool when `pre-commit` exists? 14k stars on GitHub:

> multi-language package manager for pre-commit hooks

I'm all for having options, I'm just curious at what GetHooky brings to the table.

Quit simple. To use pre-commit you would need python installed, and to be honest, not everyone is going to install python just to install pre-commit right? Meanwhile GetHooky being a CLI tool just requires you to install the respective binary for your system, and done.

Also, pre-commit's approach of creating a YAML file and then running your pre-commit hook is a bit overengineering, in my opinion. I mean, what if I just want to run pytest? A whole YAML file sounds a bit unnecessary work to me. But with GetHooky, it's simple. Just use the add command and then the install command, and your job is done. Nothing much complicated.

Hope this helped you clarify what exactly GetHooky is, its not a package that requires you to install a language for its runtime, its a CLI tool, just download the binary and done.

No mention of git hooks? Why install an extra tool for something that is already part of git? https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Customizing-Git-Git-Hooks

Using git hooks directly almost always leaves you maintaining a small collection of bash scripts for installs, upgrades, config in the long run. Personally I'm fine with that but tooling can be nice, no?

(in case it's not clear though these tools are wrappers - under the hood it's still git hooks like you linked)

It's a git hook manager.

What's the documentation site using and theme? Really like the look.

Since it’s hosted on GitHub, I snooped through the repo, and it appears to be created using VitePress [1]. [1] https://vitepress.dev/

yup its vitepress. I kind of got the idea of it from Husky. They also use vitepress too, so I thought why not?

Now thanks to Go and Rust, every single tool that are recommended to be installed in developers computers and server are required to be "sh -c "$(curl -fsSL " installed...

We are so cooked...

well you don't really have to you can just install the binary from the release page in github, but I mean, then mv it to the required location in order for it to work globally. So I thought why not just create a bash script for that.

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