Setting up pre-commit linting and helm-docs generation

The Phalanx repository uses pre-commit to lint source files and generate Helm chart documentation with helm-docs. If you’re contributing to Phalanx, you should enable pre-commit locally to ensure your work is clean and Helm chart docs are up to date.

Important

Pre-commit also runs in GitHub Actions to ensure that contributions conform to the linters. If your pull request’s “lint” step fails, it’s likely because pre-commit wasn’t enabled locally. This page shows you how to fix that.

Install pre-commit and helm-docs locally

In your clone of Phalanx, run:

make init

This command uses Python to install pre-commit and enable it in your Phalanx clone.

You will also need to install helm-docs separately. See the helm-docs installation guide for details.

What to expect when developing in Phalanx with pre-commit

Once installed, your Git commits in Phalanx are checked by the linters. If a linter “fails” the commit, you’ll need to make the necessary changes and re-try the Git commit.

Many linters make the required changes when “failing.” For example, helm-docs updates the README files for Helm charts and black reformats Python files. For these cases, you only need to git add the updated files for git commit to be successful.

Other linters, such as flake8, only point out issues. You’ll need to manually resolve those issues before re-adding and committing.

Running all files

Pre-commit normally runs only on changed files. To check all files (similar to how we run pre-commit in GitHub Actions):

pre-commit run --all-files

By-passing pre-commit

In an emergency situation, it’s possible to by-pass pre-commit when making git commits:

git commit --no-verify

Keep in mind that the pre-commit linters always run on GitHub Actions. Merging to Phalanx’s default branch while the linters “fail” the repo needs a repository admin’s action.