Support the Pre-Commit framework with a .pre-commit-hooks.yaml file

[tkcranny]

Expected Behavior Question/Feature request

This is more a blatant question and feature request:

Would a basic config for the pre-commit framework be possible, and if so, even desired for the repo to have?

It would be implemented by having a .pre-commit-hooks.yaml file in the root of the repo, that pre-commit can be pointed at in other projects to implement commit linting.

Possible Solution

Adding a .pre-commit-hooks.yaml to the project to be able to be used by the pre-commit tool simply. A number of projects, such as Prettier and Python's Black provide such files to allow the tool to be transparently installed and run as git hooks.

• Prettier's .pre-commit-hooks.yaml
• Black's .pre-commit-hooks.yaml

Context

Pre-commit is a tool for declaratively managing git hooks in a repo, not unlike husky.
The major difference is that pre-commit manages pulling down and transparently installing the tools itself, regardless of language, allowing projects to use software that don't necessarily suit being a part of a project's dependencies.

Many projects provide a .pre-commit-hooks.yaml themselves, for just this reason.

While Husky is the gold standard in the JS world, it's not ideal for multi-language projects, as you either need to set up a dedicated package.json in the root of the repository, or even less elegantly, configure it just in sub-folder, likefrontend/ for example. I believe commit linting is such a powerful tool, that anything we can do to make it more widespread is a big win, and would lead to wider spread adoption outside of just javascript environments.

Incidentally, I have run across a small repo that achieves just this, though a first party equivalent would be a much healthier signal.

[escapedcat]

Hey @tkcranny , thanks for the suggestion and providing context.
I guess this could help certain users. @byCedric what do you think?

[Cielquan]

I found a repo mirroring commitlint to provide a .pre-commit-hooks.yaml: https://github.com/alessandrojcm/commitlint-pre-commit-hook

IMHO its better to have the .pre-commit-hooks.yaml directly in the repo to use. +1 for this request.

But currently (at least for me) the hook does not work: #2254

[tkcranny]

Hi @Cielquan, I did actually link to alessandrojcm/commitlint-pre-commit-hook in the last sentance of the ticket 😛
I agree commitlint should support it with a .pre-commit-hooks.yaml file for sure.

An interesting change Prettier has done recently has been to extract the yaml file (and related npm stuff) for the pre-commit hook into its own repo. This is still a first-party solution though, so it's still a healthy sign for the Prettier project.

As for mitigating #2254, I've had to manually pin to version 9.1.1 in my company's fork of the project.

[Cielquan]

Hi @Cielquan, I did actually link to alessandrojcm/commitlint-pre-commit-hook in the last sentance of the ticket

I totally oversaw this .. lol

As for mitigating #2254, I've had to manually pin to version 9.1.1 in my company's fork of the project.

Thanks for the info.

[falcorocks]

Hey guys, I would also love to see first party support for this. As already mentioned by others, https://github.com/alessandrojcm/commitlint-pre-commit-hook project has it done for you, just a matter of copying it here!
I'm sure @alessandrojcm would be fairly proud of it!

[pkoch]

Added a PR, let's see if it gets traction.

[alessandrojcm]

Hey guys, I would also love to see first party support for this. As already mentioned by others, https://github.com/alessandrojcm/commitlint-pre-commit-hook project has it done for you, just a matter of copying it here!
I'm sure @alessandrojcm would be fairly proud of it!

I am, don't know how this flew under my radar until now. Super exciting to see my small repo used in this way 😳

[pkoch]

@alessandrojcm feel free to take over my PR. I just wanted to get something going. :)

[aentwist]

The existing hook repo is great but has 2 major problems,

1. it doesn't have latest versions
2. the tags do not match commitlint, making it impossible for renovate to update the dependency in pre-commit configs

So I think there is a lot of value to be gained here...

Are we interested in putting the file here? If the maintainers are not interested in that, the alternative is building a mirror, which the pre-commit maintainers apparently do not want to do -

We’d also like to get the .pre-commit-hooks.yaml files added to popular linters without maintaining forks / mirrors.

https://pre-commit.com/#contributing

[pkoch]

There's a tool for that, tho. I can't recall exactly, but you can probably sleuth on @asottile for guidance. In the past, I've forked that tool to get the desired behavior, and added a GitHub Action to run daily and update state. Do mind the stock tool always recreates the whole git history (or it did, back then), which is a bit unwieldy.

Thread patiently.

[alessandrojcm]

The existing hook repo is great but has 2 major problems,

1. it doesn't have latest versions
2. the tags do not match commitlint, making it impossible for renovate to update the dependency in pre-commit configs

So I think there is a lot of value to be gained here...

Are we interested in putting the file here? If the maintainers are not interested in that, the alternative is building a mirror, which the pre-commit maintainers apparently do not want to do -

We’d also like to get the .pre-commit-hooks.yaml files added to popular linters without maintaining forks / mirrors.

https://pre-commit.com/#contributing

Hey @aentwist I do try to keep up with the releases, but sometimes, dependabot notifications just slip under the radar. I actually am looking into automating that, but if you do need a release done, feel free to tag me in the dependabot PRs, and I'll merge them. As per your second point, it does not make sense to follow commitlint versioning, IMO. What is your use case for that?

EDIT: Point 1 has been automated now, dependabot PRs will be merged automatically and new tagged versions will be published after that.

[aentwist]

This issue being years old I make the assumption that it has no priority with the maintainers as I do not see any here. I went ahead and spent today pushing the limits of pre-commit... which didn't go well... and making a more standard mirror project https://github.com/aentwist/pre-commit-mirrors-commitlint. It additionally has point 2 from above - if you are not concerned about such then @alessandrojcm project is great. Update: In addition to the basic commit hook, it supports running in all CIs with a manual invocation I also do not support Travis, or anything other than commitlint --edit for that matter. At least for now, although personally I'm done putting time into this.

@pkoch yes, the tool can be seen in other mirrors like mirrors-eslint and mirrors-prettier. It is called pre-commit-mirror-maker. Gave it a try today, works ok.