My goal is to automate as much as possible in my workflow, to decrease cognitive overhead and leave more headspace for actual work. Things that contribute to this goal are shortkeys, linters that are triggered on save, pre-commit hooks and much more. I want to talk a little bit more about the last one: pre-commit hooks. As the name reveals, these hooks, or scripts, are ran before submission of new code. A script can be a check if the contributor is trying to submit secrets, has unused imports or wrong indentation, just to name a view. Also, you can easily create your own hook and run a script that you wrote. Lately, I created a hook to generate a section of my CI/CD pipeline based on the folder-structure of my repository, but there are countless use cases, so be creative. The best thing about pre-commit is that its config (.pre-commit-config.yaml) is tracked by Git, so every contributor gets to use the same "commit rules". I'll quickly show a couple of the pre-commit hooks that I find very convenient in Python projects:
repos:
- repo: https://github.com/psf/black
rev: 23.7.0
hooks:
- id: black
language_version: python3.10
args: [--line-length=88]
- repo: https://github.com/astral-sh/ruff-pre-commit
rev: v0.0.278
hooks:
- id: ruff
- repo: https://github.com/pycqa/isort
rev: 5.12.0
hooks:
- id: isort
name: isort (python)
From top to bottom: black is a Python code formatter that adheres to the PEP8 style guide and is opinioniated. With this small addition to your settings.json in VSCode, you can use black to format your code when you save the file:
"[python]": {
"editor.defaultFormatter": "ms-python.black-formatter",
"editor.formatOnSave": true
}
Since using this solution in VSCode, I find myself often writing code with sloppy whitespaces and indentation because I know it will get formatted on save. Very convenient and fast. Talking about fast, the second hook that I use a lot is ruff. This is basically flake8 (a style guide enforcer) on steriods (rebuilt with Rust). ruff helps me to identify redundant, or missing code and safeguards a level of hygiene in the project. The last hook that I recently added to my default config is isort, which helps me to order my imports. I always have a hard time keeping my imports ordered and frankly, I just don't want to be bothered with this kind of overhead. isort orders imports alphabetically, into sections and by type. It make Python code much more readable and it allows you to be sloppy and not spend time on singing the ABC song in your head.
You might ask yourself: how do you ensure that contributors are installing pre-commit hooks properly and not work around your carefully constucted rules that are described in pre-commit-config.yaml? I usually run the checks in the CI pipeline as well. So unfixed code should result in a failing pipeline and lets the contributor know to pre-commit install, pre-commit run --all and try again. If you happen to host your project on Github, you can even use templates that handle the logic.