How To Test Code Before Pushing To The Repository

Are you truly ready to push your code to repository? Or you still thinking on how to test it before?

tl;dr

• it is good to test the code before pushing to the repo,
• you can setup automatic testing with GIT Hooks, but it is complicated,
• there is a really easy way for testing before committing changes, it is called pre-commit,

As a professional developer you need to make sure your code is working, tested and it has been written correctly: easy to read and understand and compliant to team coding standards. As a smart developer, you can help yourself and set up automatic pre-commit checking, you can use it for checking:

• code test coverage,
• SCSS style guide compliance,
• JS style guide compliance.

Step 1: Install pre-commit npm module

There are some ways to setup GIT hooks, but it can be a bit complicated, and you need to do the same job for every repository.

Much easier way is to use npm module called pre-commit, it creates GIT hooks automatically.

Let’s try that:

npm install --save-dev pre-commit

Step 2: Setup testing script

Ok so we have the tool for automatic testing, now we need to define a test script. In our case, it will be checking JavaScript Standard Style compliance in all files inside src/js folder.

Let’s add the script in package.json file:

"scripts": {
    "lint": "standard 'src/js/**/*.js'"
}

It is good to test what we’ve already done so let’s run the script manually to check if it’s working:

npm run lint;

Step 3: Adding a test script to pre-commit

Ok! When the testing script is created we need to add it to the pre-commit configuration (also in package.json file):

"pre-commit": [
    "lint"
],

Step 4: Let’s give a try

Once everything is set up, you can try to do the commit.  Pre-commit hook should automatically do the testing and prevent you from committing in case problems with the code.

pre-commit test run pre-commit blocked the commit because of JavaScript issues in source code

Thanks nante 😉