Recently I've been working on a new Go project, it must be shared across the team, and I wanted to be sure that all of the tests passed and have a goimports and golint run every time before a commit, just to have that pretty code and follow some standards.

I know this can be done with git hooks, but since the content of these need to be inside of the .git folder, it'll be hard to share across the repository and the team, and later if you want to make some changes on the hooks, it gets even harder!

I came across pre-commit, an awesome framework that helps you manage and maintain multi-language pre-commit hooks. It is fairly easy to install, works with Go out of the box, and once you have your configuration set in your .pre-commit-config.yaml, you just have to add it to your repo and just tell your team to install pre-commit and run pre-commit install on their project. That's it! Every time they commit to the repo the hooks that are set on the configuration file will be run.

The good thing about this framework is that it gets the hooks from remote repositories, you don't have to install anything or whatnot, so at the end, the .pre-commit-config.yaml acts pretty much like a mod file.

You can find multiple repositories that contain pretty good hooks for Go ready for pre-commit. My favorites are:

• https://github.com/dnephin/pre-commit-golang
• https://github.com/Bahjat/pre-commit-golang
• https://github.com/TekWizely/pre-commit-golang#go-fmt

You can decide which hooks to run from which repository, it's up to you. For example, I run hooks from two different because the one for unit tests does a better job on Bahjat repository.

This is the .pre-commit-config.yaml that I'm currently using:

repos:
  - repo: git://github.com/dnephin/pre-commit-golang
    rev: master
    hooks:
      - id: go-imports
  - repo: git://github.com/Bahjat/pre-commit-golang
    rev: master
    hooks:
      - id: go-lint
      - id: go-unit-tests

Feel free to grab it use it in your own projects, it works pretty fine for me!