plasticine / amaze-pre-commit

Make a machine do it

Enforced, opinionated code formatting is the best thing since sliced bread. Arguing, debating and changing formatting semantics is whatever the opposite of sliced bread is.

Don’t get me wrong however — code formatting is important — it’s the debating of it that’s not. Everyone will have their own personal preferences anyway, none of which really matter because they’re almost always purely subjective, and the variation in code style and use/misuse of language idiom usually renders any hang-ups around formatting moot in most teams anyway in my opinion. Better to give up and make a machine do it!

So when I get the chance one of the first things I ever do for something I’m hacking on is wire up some tools to mean that I never have to think about this stuff ever again.

This repo is how I usually configure things (To be honest most of my motivation for putting this here is so that I don’t have to keep digging it out the last project I worked on...). It’s nothing special, really is only about a dozen lines of pretty average Bash, but it works well and is suited to a lot of the projects I tend to work on where I have lots of different languages at play in the one repo.

Here’s what it does;

• Support for arbitrary formatters — it’s just shell.
• Support for formatting sub-paths — it’s also just shell.
• Code formatting via a Git pre-commit hook — ugh, javascript.

Setup

Configure the pre-commit hook (you want this as a part of your project bootstrap so everyone gets it)

make .git/hooks/pre-commit

Configure the paths you want to lint in package.json in the root of your project

Each subpath is responsible for configuring it’s formatting. The JS project will probably use prettier, and for actually civilised lanuages like Go or Elixir you can just directly use their toolchain — whatever, just don’t pick a tool with lots of options because then you’ll just argue about the options. Benevolent dictator tooling 4 lyfe.

Anyway, basically all that script/format does is change path into the subdir and runs the command you gave it.

These paths will be formatted in parallel so it shouldn’t slow down your commit speed too much.

amaze-pre-commit/package.json

Lines 4 to 17 in 9c0b328

	"linters": {
	"services/js-project/**/*.{js,jsx,json,css}": [
	"script/format 'services/js-project' 'yarn format'",
	"git add"
	],
	"services/elixir-projec/**/*.{ex,exs}": [
	"script/format 'services/elixir-project' 'mix format'",
	"git add"
	],
	"services/go-project/**/*.{go}": [
	"script/format 'services/go-project' 'go fmt'",
	"git add"
	]
	}

{
  "services/js-project/**/*.{js,jsx,json,css}": [
    "script/format 'services/js-project' 'yarn format'",
    "git add"
  ],
  "services/elixir-projec/**/*.{ex,exs}": [
    "script/format 'services/elixir-project' 'mix format'",
    "git add"
  ],
  "services/go-project/**/*.{go}": [
    "script/format 'services/go-project' 'go fmt'",
    "git add"
  ]
}

---

Anyway thanks for reading my blog post thing. Have a GIF: