We can easily improve our developer experience by:

• Preventing broken code being committed/pushed.
• Avoiding pointless arguments about formatting in our code reviews.

We decided to use git pre-commit hooks to help prevent "broken" commits.

We started from an existing TypeScript project, but here's a demo repository if you want to have a look.

1. Install prettier, husky and lint-staged

yarn add -D prettier husky lint-staged

None of these are required at run time so it's important to use -D so that the dependencies are added to "devDependencies".

2. Configure prettier

We need to create two files:

.prettierrc:

{
  "printWidth": 120,
  "proseWrap": "preserve",
  "semi": false,
  "singleQuote": true,
  "useTabs": false,
  "tabWidth": 2,
  "arrowParens": "avoid",
  "trailingComma": "es5"
}

.prettierignore:

node_modules
build
dist
res
coverage

You can of course configure this in any way you like.

3. Create a lint-staged config file: .lintstagedrc:

{
  "**/*.+(js|jsx|css|less|scss|ts|tsx|md)": [
    "prettier --write",
    "git add"
  ]
}

This is configured to run prettier and overwrite any staged files that match the pattern above and then staging the new changes (if any).

4. Create a husky config file: .huskyrc:

{
  "hooks": {
    "pre-commit": "tsc && lint-staged"
  }
}

This is configuring the pre-commit hook. It will run tsc and then lint-staged using the configuration files discussed above.

5. Success!

Now every time I try to commit, the pre-commit hook will run. If -for some reason- my code doesn't compile I'll get an error and a chance to fix it before committing.

And I don't have to worry about code formatting because prettier will format any staged files before committing.

Demo Repository

I've setup a very basic repository on GitHub as a demo.

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Photo by Simon Wilkes on Unsplash