Pre-Push Time Saver

Git has a range of hooks that you can use to protect yourself against mistakes, or ensure code standards are kept across your team. I recently had a need to add a pre-push hook to save myself some time when pushing up new PR's.

Our test suite can take quite a while to run, so I'll typically push up, and then move onto other things to come back in a little bit after CI has finished in case tweaks are needed that I missed or didn't run into locally.

Occasionally, I'll be working on a part of the code that looks okay in VSCode, but then fails our typechecking or lint checks because a part of my change broke a file I didn't have open. This pre-push hook makes sure I don't forget to run typechecking before I push up any changes, and will block the push if it fails. Meaning I get a much quicker feedback loop locally rather than needing to wait for CI.

While this does slow down my initial pushes, it's saved me more times than it probably should have and let me fix things up before the CI gets a chance to run.

How to install

To get this running in a project, we can create a file in .git/hooks/pre-push and make it executable with chmod +x .git/hooks/pre-push:

#!/bin/zsh

cmd="yarn run typecheck" # replace with your typechecking/linting command

echo "running typecheck before push..."
eval $cmd
result=$?
if ! eval "$cmd"; then
echo "Failed typecheck! Fix before pushing or force push: \`git push --no-verify\`" >&2
exit 1
fi

exit 0

VSCode integration

To get this working in VSCode, we also need to add the push command to the git.commandsToLog setting inside our VSCode preferences. This allows us to view the error log on failure from within VSCode too.

With these two things in place, we're off to the races!

ℹ️ note
In case you ever need to "just get it pushed", you can force push
your branch by using the --no-verify flag: git push --no-verify

This article was originally published on simonporter.co.uk