Show HN: Pre-commit – A framework for managing multi-language pre-commit hooks

Hey everyone, creators of pre-commit here. Thought it was a good idea to clarify what makes our project different from most other systems.

Even thought pre-commit is written in python we really don't care about the language that was used to write the hook/linter. If there's a good linter out there written in ruby, you should be able to use it and not have to install ruby/gems/etc. With pre-commit you just say you want scss-lint (https://github.com/causes/scss-lint) in your pre-commit config file and run pre-commit install. When you commit, pre-commit downloads, install scss-lint (without root) and runs the hook against the files you've changed.

Currently we support ruby, node and python and we definitely want to expand the system to support linters in other languages like Go, C/C++ and PHP. We'd really like to support all of these linters - https://github.com/showcases/clean-code-linters.

Ken & Anthony

Another shameless plug, for my git-hooks project I wrote a few years ago https://github.com/icefox/git-hooks It is a single small bash script with no external depenandancies so it just needs to be in your path.

  git-hooks provide a way to manage and share your hooks using three+ locations:

  User hooks, installed in ~/.git_hooks/
  Project hooks, installed in .git/git_hooks/ in a project.
  Global hooks, specified with the hooks.global configuration option.

Another very real problem with any hooks solution is that it must be enabled in each repository. Users frequently either don't do it or forget to do it in all of the repositories. Running git hooks --installglobal will force any new git repository or any git repository you clone to have a reminder to install git hooks. (It can't be on by default for security reasons of course.)

This is cool but why do we need it if Mercurial already supports pre-commit hooks?

For example we have this for refreshing redmine:

  #!/bin/sh
  
  PROJ=""
  
  while [ $# -gt 0 ] ; do
      case $1 in
        --project)
          shift
  	PROJ="&id=$1"
          shift
  	;;
      esac
  done

  echo $"Refreshing Redmine"

  curl -s -o /dev/null "http://issues.qbixstaging.com/sys/fetch_changesets?key=jI$

and here is our PHP syntax check:

  #!/bin/sh

  ### Configuration
  HGBIN="/usr/bin/hg"
  phpPath="/usr/bin/php"
  tmpstyle=`/bin/mktemp -t`

  ### hg log style file
  cat > $tmpstyle << EOF
  changeset = "{files}\n"
  file = "{file}\n"
  EOF

  ### PHP syntax check
  for f in `$HGBIN log -r $HG_NODE:tip --style $tmpstyle | grep -E "\.php[3-5]?$" | sort | uniq` ; do
        res=`$HGBIN cat -r tip $f | $phpPath -l -d display_errors=1 -d error_reporting=4`
        if [ $? -ne 0 ] ; then
                echo $f 1>&2
                echo $res 1>&2
                exit 1
        fi
  done
  rm $tmpstyle

finally here is one for JS:

  #!/bin/sh
  
  ### Configuration
  HGBIN="/usr/bin/hg"
  jshPath="/usr/local/bin/jshint"
  tmpstyle=`/bin/mktemp -t`

  ### hg log style file
  cat > $tmpstyle << EOF
  changeset = "{files}\n"
  file = "{file}\n"
  EOF

  ### JS syntax check
  for f in `$HGBIN log -r $HG_NODE:tip --style $tmpstyle | grep -E "\.js$" | sort | uniq` ; do
        res=`$HGBIN cat -r tip $f | $jshPath --config /projects/.jshintrc --verbose - | grep "(E"`
        st=$?
	if [ $st -eq 0 ] ; then
                echo $f 1>&2
                echo $res 1>&2
                exit 1
        fi
  	if [ $st -gt 1 ] ; then
                exit 1
        fi
  done
  rm $tmpstyle

I (think i) understand it, but i did not understand the workflow.

Before i commit, i run local tests to be sure that my code is ok (with jshint, ...). Normally i work with my local branch before i push it to other developers.

Why should i share unfinished untested code to others?

Or is pre-commit a kind of local history (like Eclipse holds it in background for every file)?

Shameful plug, but I wrote https://github.com/Newky/hooked/ which allows you to deal with git hooks (in general) in a nicer fashion using Python.

Might be of use to someone.

there is https://github.com/jish/pre-commit already