Let say your company has coding standard. It is written somewhere in the company documentation. As new onboard, you read this document thoroughly. Then you start create your first pull request. Then you still left a trailing whitespace on some lines.

BTW, it is a good start that a company has coding standard. If a company does not have or does not follow any existing coding standard, things will be mess. As code is read much more often than it is written, we should have convention on how we write code.

To enforce this coding standard, we can use git pre-commit hook. Let start from the simplest one where we forbid a code to have a trailing whitespace. The first thing you need to do is activate git pre-commit hook.

# Read the instruction in the file
$ vim .git/hooks/pre-commit.sample

# To enable this hook, rename this file to "pre-commit".
$ mv .git/hooks/pre-commit.sample .git/hooks/pre-commit

Try to make a commit with a trailing whitespace:

za@kwazii:02:49:04 {pep8-compliance} ~/dev/github/za/sandbox$ git diff HEAD

diff --git a/plant.py b/plant.py
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..b8904ac
--- /dev/null
+++ b/plant.py
@@ -0,0 +1,4 @@
+#!/usr/bin/python
+
+def sum(a, b):
+    return None  

Try to commit it:

za@kwazii:02:49:59 {pep8-compliance} ~/dev/github/za/sandbox$ git commit -v
plant.py:4: trailing whitespace.
+    return None  

So you cannot commit the code unless you have removed the trailing whitespace. What if we want to enforce PEP8 compliance on each code? How we enforce this using git pre-commit hook?

So, we will use existing git pre-commit hook file for PEP8 compliance. We will use this cbrueffer github repo:

# Download the pre-commit file
$ wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cbrueffer/pep8-git-hook/master/pre-commit

# Move it to .git/hooks folder
$ mv pre-commit .git/hooks/

# Set it as executable
$ chmod u+x .git/hooks/pre-commit

And now we need to setup virtualenv to install

$ virtualenv -p `which python3` .venv
$ source .venv/bin/activate
(.venv)$ pip install pycodestyle

Try to commit a file which is breaking PEP8. Create the file.

#!/usr/bin/python


from datetime import *
def sum(a, b):
    return None

def div(a, b):
  return a/b  

Try to commit it.

(.venv)$ git add plant.py
(.venv)$ git commit -v

PEP8 style violations have been detected.  Please fix them
or force the commit with "git commit --no-verify".

./plant.py:5:1: E302 expected 2 blank lines, found 0
./plant.py:8:1: E302 expected 2 blank lines, found 1
./plant.py:9:3: E111 indentation is not a multiple of four
./plant.py:9:11: E226 missing whitespace around arithmetic operator
./plant.py:9:13: W291 trailing whitespace

Rather than doing it manually, we need to have this .git/hooks/pre-commit file to automate the process of PEP8 code checking.

Zaki Akhmad

Zaki Akhmad

Engineer

Joined October 2014. Used to be a breaker and now learns how to be a builder, Zaki has long journey in application security. And now he's trying to practice the theory of building a secure application.