Netlify pre-commit and other news

Preface

Announcing netlify-plugin-pre-commit. (They’ve come through!)

A side project while ramping up ‘real’ work

I finally have an experimental pre-release of a software tool I have had on my To Do list to create, for quite some time. I did it now, because my time for such projects will soon be in short supply.

Description of pre-commit plugin for Netlify

Speed up use of pre-commit with Netlify (especially by caching hook installation).

What that means

Some definitions

pre-commit

A tool to make ‘git hook scripts’ easy. Git hook scripts are useful for identifying simple issues before submission. We run our hooks on every commit to automatically point out issues in code such as missing semicolons, trailing whitespace, and debug statements. This allows developers and reviewers to focus on the architecture of a change, not trivial style nitpicks. (Paraphrased from Introduction [to pre-commit]).

Netlify

An all-in-one platform which helps you combine your favorite tools and APIs to build the fastest sites (and more) for the composable web. Use any frontend framework (the author of this article uses Hugo) to build, preview, and deploy to Netlify’s global network from Git. (Paraphrased from Welcome to Netlify).

Git

A free and open source distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency. (From the Git SCM website).

The problem the plugin solves

When pushing a new update to stock Netlify (e.g. to website or blog) and one verifies one’s source files as part of building one’s site on Netlify using pre-commit, there one’s site deployment takes significantly longer than pushing without verification. The largest chunk of this time is spent installing the software used by pre-commit. netlify-plugin-pre-commit solves this issue by caching the software used by the ‘pre-commit hooks’ in the cache provided by Netlify.

Additional features

The plugin also makes using pre-commit easier by ‘auto-installing’ pre-commit and the hook software defined in .pre-commit-config.yaml, if said file exists in the Git repository sent to Netlify. (One sends Git repositories to Netlify so that it can process and deploy (e.g.) websites/blogs on Netlify’s ‘cloud’ servers).

Where you can find netlify-plugin-pre-commit

As an NPM package (for Node.js)

This makes installation a breeze. See below.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/netlify-plugin-pre-commit

The source code on GitHub

https://github.com/danielfdickinson/netlify-plugin-pre-commit

Using netlify-plugin-pre-commit

Install

Currently this plugin can only be installed using file-based installation.

Example: add the following to your netlify.toml file

[[plugins]]
package = "netlify-plugin-pre-commit"

And add the NPM package to your package.json

1. Change to the directory containing the Git repository for a website for which you want to use the plugin.

2. If you have not already, execute npm init to create a new package.json

3. Execute the following command to add the plugin to the development dependencies (software to include) for your website build.

   npm install --save-dev netlify-plugin-pre-commit
   

4. If you have not already, create the pre-commit-config.yaml for your site. (See https://pre-commit.com/#2-add-a-pre-commit-configuration).

5. Now the plugin and pre-commit are enabled and will be used each time you create a merge request against, or push to, your main (production) branch.