precommit-example

There are a lot of tools out there that take away the burden of configuring your IDE to run linter tools (e.g. autoformatting code, checking for adherence to a style guide, making sure code has no syntax errors, …). Or for you to remember all these little things that make your code just that tiny bit better.

Developers do wisely to use such tools. Even better is when these tools can be set up for the entire team so everyone benefits from them and they happen before your changes end up at the CI/CD system, or -gasp- in production.

At Data Minded, I gave a talk about pre-commit, a tool that does just that. It is configured through one config file, that you can commit to your code repo, so everyone in the team has the same git hooks configured, which benefits the team, as you can keep code review more focussed on the hard parts, the parts that require creativity in code.

I upload this example, which is used in one of the code bases I’m involved with, so my colleagues can get a jumping board. 🚀

Mention the getting-started in your README

A good readme contains a succinct section to help people get started contributing to the code. Here’s what I had written for that particular project:

Contribute

1. Clone the repository.

2. Install Poetry. This tool serves similar functionality as Pipenv. As it is usable across projects, it is advisable to install in to your user directory, regardless of virtual environments.

3. Install the development dependencies using poetry:

   poetry install

   This will automatically install the development dependencies, as well as the current project, inside of a virtual environment, managed by poetry.

4. With your virtual environment activated, run pre-commit install. This will ensure you run the git hooks that are configured in this repo (see pre-commit-config.yaml). The first time you run this, it will be slow, as all external tools will need to get downloaded and get their own virtual environments. Any subsequent call is fast. It’s recommended to try running the hooks against all the files: pre-commit run --all-files.

   Note: one of the hooks checks the format of your commit messages. To make better use of the git log, a format is imposed, so that we may avoid senseless commits like "fix", which give very little info and thus make it harder to trace changes. To simplfy adherence to the commit message format, the tool commitizen is installed. Rather than issuing git commit, run cz commit and it will walk you through the commit procedure to generate more useful commit messages.