Git Hooks Made Easy: How Whisky Helps Developers with Len Woodward

Published on August 16th, 2024 by Eric L. Barnes

In this episode of the Laravel Creator Spotlight, we are joined by Len Woodward, the creator of Whisky, to talk about the project.

Whisky Introduction

Whisky is the simplest, framework agnostic, CLI tool for managing and enforcing a php project's git hooks across an entire team.

Git hooks are a fantastic tool to ensure that code hitting version control satisfies your org's code quality standards. However, .git/hooks is not included in your git tree. This makes it impractical to have all contributors to a repository use the same checks with the same settings.

Whisky Installation

Whisky's only dependency is php^8.1.

You can install the package via composer:

composer require --dev projektgopher/whisky
./vendor/bin/whisky install

This is the recommended method, as every developer on your project will have access to the tool.

Global Installation

Whisky can be installed globally, however this means that any developer on your project will also need it installed globally if they want to use it.

composer global require projektgopher/whisky
whisky install

If Whisky is installed both globally, and locally, on a project the version that's run will depend on how the command is invoked.

Whisky Usage

The install command will create a whisky.json file in your project root:

// whisky.json
{
  "disabled": [],
  "hooks": {
    "pre-commit": [
      "./vendor/bin/pint --dirty"
    ],
    "pre-push": [
      "php artisan test"
    ]
  }
}

Warning all hooks are evaluated as-is in the terminal. Keep this in mind when committing anything involving changes to your whisky.json.

Adding or removing any hooks (not individual commands) to your whisky.json file should be followed by ./vendor/bin/whisky update to ensure that these changes are reflected in your .git/hooks directory.