Automation — PHP Code Formatting before(pre) git commit

Introduction

Git hooks are scripts that will run when a certain event occurs in git like git push, git pull, git commit, etc…
We can find git hooks at .git/hooks in a particular git repository.

Pre-commit is a git hook, that triggers custom scripts or commands during the execution of a git commit.

In this article, we will format PHP code using prettier at the time of committing code to git.

We will use:

• Prettier: a very nice npm package for formatting JavaScript code.
• Prettier/plugin-php: prettier’s plugin for formatting PHP code.
• Husky: npm package for initiating pre-commit hook in the project. So if you forgot to format PHP files, husky will format the code before committing.

Let’s begin!

Install Prettier and Husky as dev dependencies

npm install --save-dev prettier @prettier/plugin-php husky

Create git hooks using Husk

npx husky install

Add husky configuration

npx husky add .husky/pre-commit ""

This will create a pre-commit file in the .husky directory in the project’s root.

Then add the following script to the .husky/pre-commit at the end of the file.

prettier — write $(git diff — name-only — diff-filter=ACMR — cached ) && git add .

What will the above script do?

• git diff — name-only — cached: Returns the name of changed files.
• — diff-filter=ACMR: Select only files that are Added (A), Copied (C), Modified (M), Renamed (R).
• prettier — write: Go through all PHP files and format them if needed.
• git add .: Add changed files to git

Add .prettierignore

During formatting code, we do not need to format some files like, node_modules files, .env, .sh, .json, or .yml files.

We need to add those files in .prettierignore. Prettier will ignore those files at the time of formatting.

Here is an example of .prettierignore. You can add any file you want to.

/node_modules
*.json
*.sh
.env.*
*.yml

That’s it. Let’s format the code.

Nope!! let’s commit the code.

Add files and commit changes to git

git add . && git commit -m "Added pre-commit hook"

In the output, you will see that prettier had formatted changed(staged) files and committed changes to git.

You do not need to use any extra plugins for formatting PHP code. Also now onwards, you do not have to format files whenever you push changes to git and can spend your time on other tasks.

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