Running rubocop on changed files

We have just started using rubocop rigorously on legacy codebases we work on, but rubocop takes a minute or more to run every time we commit. This is a bit boring, but we don’t want to have to wait for CI to tell us that it fails.

So should really just run rubocop on changed files at latest before committing, or on the diff between head and remote’s head before pushing.

Updated 28/May/2017 (see below)

tldr;

• before commiting:

  git ls-files -m | xargs ls -1 2>/dev/null | grep '\.rb$' | xargs rubocop -a --force-exclusion
  

• before pushing:

  git diff-tree -r --no-commit-id --name-only master@\{u\} head | xargs ls -1 2>/dev/null | grep '\.rb$' | xargs rubocop -a --force-exclusion
  

• in ci

  rubocop
  

Non technical overview

Rubocop is a tool to make some kinds of ruby coding errors and bad formatting more obvious (and sometimes automatically fixable). The consistency if enforces makes code more readable, more reliable and faster to extend and improve. In this article I give some tips for how to make rubocop check just the files that have changed (and explain how I got there).

Run before committing

There’s a great post on this by Michal Orman which was a really great start. But there are tweaks to improve this: git ls-files -m is better than git status --porcelain | cut -c4-, as git status includes more complex output in the case of renames. However it will still include deleted files, so you need to filter through ls to find files that actually exist (and this stack overflow question helped here http://stackoverflow.com/questions/21119035/filter-list-of-files-to-those-that-exist) so: git ls-files -m | xargs ls -1 2>/dev/null (you don’t actually need the -1 if you’re piping it to another command, but useful to see what’s happening here).

One more thing (adding to Pawel’s tweak) is that if you have any files which end with .rb.something (e.g. .rb.orig might be still kicking around from a previous merge conflict) then you want to just get ones that have .rb at the end grep '\.rb$'

So my final version is:

git ls-files -m | xargs ls -1 2>/dev/null | grep '\.rb$' | xargs rubocop

Run before pushing

When pushing, the final | xargs ls -1 2>/dev/null | grep '\.rb$' | xargs rubocop is the same, but gathering the list of changed files is different. If it’ just one commit you could use git diff-tree -r --no-commit-id --name-only head to output a list of files changed (including deleted) in the head. But this won’t be comprehensive if you have more than one commit. Another option is to compare with master or origin/master with git diff-tree -r --no-commit-id --name-only head origin/master. Or a fancy option is to use git diff-tree -r --no-commit-id --name-only @\{u\} head to track changes against the current upstream. But this won’t work if you haven’t yet set up a remote tracking branch. I’d like to have some shortcut for files that have changed since master and that seems to me to be (using master@{u} to refer)

git diff-tree -r --no-commit-id --name-only master@\{u\} head

(NB giving the command the form that will work in zsh – it can simply be @{u} without backslashes if your shell doesn’t use zsh’s brace expansion)

Automatically fix, but exclude

Add -a to automaically fix. But then you have some rules perhaps to exclude some files, so add –force-exclusion to force rubocop to respect your exclusion rules even on the set of files you’ve explicitly passed as arguments

Git hooks! Yes? Not for me

You could go all out and add this as a git hook and force yourself and/or everyone to have this workflow. Feels like a mistake to me. That’s what CI is for, to catch errors. There may be good reason not to run rubocop (e.g. you just ran it anyway) or bad reasons (you don’t have time…)

Moreover

In general:

• git ls-files -m | xargs ls -1 2>/dev/null is useful as an alias for “files modified since the last commit”
• git diff-tree -r --no-commit-id --name-only master@\{u\} head | xargs ls -1 2>/dev/null is useful as an alias for “files modified compared with master”

These might work well as git aliases or zsh functions

UPDATE [28/May/2017]

I’ve added the section for automatically fixing, now I worked out (from rubocop docs) how to get rubocop to exclude the files based on your .rubocop.yml. I’ve updated the resultant command lines