[2021] Setting up Husky pre-commit hook with ESLint, Prettier and lint-staged for React and React Native.

Hello folks. I hope you all are doing well.
In this post, we will talk about how you can setup Husky pre-commit hook with ESLint, Prettier and lint-staged to avoid bad commits and properly format code before committing. So let's get into it.

What is Husky?

Husky lets us run commands or script before committing or pushing our code to git. There are a lot of other use cases of Husky too but we will only be using pre-commit hook for this article.

What is ESLint?

ESLint is a tool that can analyze our code and find errors in that code using ESLint rules. It can also fix some errors on its own.

What is Prettier?

Prettier is an opinionated code formatter that can format our code with the help of rules that you set or defaults are used.

What is lint-staged?

lint-staged can run multiple linters against staged git files which in our case are ESLint and Pretttier.

Setup new React or React Native project.

For React use
npx create-react-app demo
cd demo

For React Native use
npx react-native init demo
cd demo

Let's install some necessary libraries.

npm i -D husky lint-staged eslint-config-airbnb prettier

Here we are saving these modules as devDependencies to specify that these are only required in the development and not in runtime. I am using Airbnb's pre config file for ESLint. You can also go plain if you want to setup all ESLint rules by your self or you can also extend multiple pre configs like this.

Setting up ESLint

Replace or create .eslintrc.js file with the following code. If you have created a React project then remove "eslintConfig" from the package.json file as we have created a separate configuration file for the ESLint.

It is advisable to extend "react-app" for React projects and "@react-native-community" for React Native projects. These files are automatically installed so you don't need to worry about them. Just append this to the start of the array in the extend option in the file.

Setting up Prettier

Replace or create .prettierrc.js file with the following code.

Setting up Husky pre-commit hook and lint-staged

In the latest versions of Husky we need to enable Git Hooks and then create and add the pre-commit hook. To do that run the following commands in the terminal.
npx husky install
npx husky add .husky/pre-commit "npx --no-install lint-staged"

Make sure to commit the auto-generated husky folder to your Git repo.

The above code will run lint-staged command against the staged files before committing. Make sure to run npx husky install if you clone your Husky configured git repo.

So now let's add the lint-staged in our package.json file.

Open your package.json file and add the code that I have specified at the same level as dependencies.

The above code will run Prettier and ESLint rules against all js,jsx,ts,tsx staged files. You can also specify more file extensions or you can write a script for a specific folder you want.

Read Also: How React Native Improves Developer Productivity

So yeah that's it. Now when you will try to commit any changes, ESLint and Prettier rules will execute and it will format your code and give you errors if there are any and stop you from causing any bad commits.

Note: If you get dependency errors for eslint-plugin-jsx-a11y or eslint-plugin-import while commiting, then also install them as devDependencies.

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