Use cspell in commit-msg hook

[lonix1]

I'm trying to use cspell to spell check the commit message, as shown in the cspell docs:

exec npx cspell --no-summary --no-progress --language-id commit-msg $1

So I converted that to a commit-msg hook like so:

commit-msg:
  jobs:
    - name: spellcheck
      run: pnpm exec cspell --config .config/cspell.json --no-progress --no-summary --language-id commit-msg {1}

That doesn't work:

$ git commit -m 'hello'

exit status 1
🥊 spellcheck (2.29 seconds)

I'm also using cspell in a pre-commit hook to spellcheck actual files, and it works perfectly - so cspell is not the issue.

I think this has something to do with how lefthook passes the commit message to cspell via {1}.

Is this a bug?

Any suggestions?

[yudin-s]

{1} is the right Lefthook template for commit-msg.

The Lefthook docs say commit-msg receives one Git argument: the path to the file containing the proposed commit message. They also document {1} as the first hook argument, and their own commit-msg example uses {1} against that file.

I would make two small changes while debugging:

commit-msg:
  jobs:
    - name: spellcheck
      run: pnpm exec cspell --config .config/cspell.json --no-progress --no-summary --language-id commit-msg "{1}"

The quotes are mainly to protect odd paths. The bigger issue is that exit status 1 is still just the child command exit code, so you need to see whether cspell is failing because it found a spelling issue, cannot read the file, or dislikes the config.

For one run, remove --no-summary, or increase Lefthook output, for example:

LEFTHOOK_OUTPUT="failure,execution,execution_out,execution_info" git commit -m "hello"

You can also test the same command directly against the file Git passes:

pnpm exec cspell --config .config/cspell.json --language-id commit-msg .git/COMMIT_EDITMSG

So I would not treat this as a Lefthook argument-passing bug yet. {1} should be the commit message file path; the next thing to expose is cspell own output. If that resolves the Lefthook side of it, please mark the answer.

[mrexox]

@lonix1 here is a good recommendation. I would also ask you to run LEFTHOOK_VERBOSE=1 git commit ... to show debug logs. If the command fails it must exit with non-zero value, so probably there's a hidden problem there.

[lonix1]

I discovered the cspell switch --no-must-find-files which silences the error due to having no files to check. Meaning cspell is not receiving the git commit message.

So now I'm trying a commit message which should fail: git commit -m 'asdfasdf'.

Interesting:

• - run: echo "{1}" works, shows ".git/COMMIT_EDITMSG"
• - run: cat "{1}" works, shows "hello"

I think cspell is not receiving anything to check, yet the cat {1} test does work.

Maybe it's a cspell bug? I posted on that repo instead.

[mrexox]

Just for the context: I could make it work like this:

$ cat lefthook.yml
commit-msg:
  jobs:
    - run: npx cspell --no-summary --no-progress --language-id commit-msg {1}

$ git commit --amend -m 'no waaay this passes'
╭─────────────────────────────────────────────╮
│ 🥊 lefthook  v2.1.9-dev   hook:  commit-msg │
╰─────────────────────────────────────────────╯
┃  npx cspell --no-summary --no-progress --language-id commit-msg {1} ❯
.git/COMMIT_EDITMSG:1:4 - Unknown word (waaay)

exit status 1
  ────────────────────────────────────
summary: (done in 1.13 seconds)
🥊 npx cspell --no-summary --no-progress --language-id commit-msg {1} (1.13 seconds)

[lonix1]

Thank you for this! It proved to me that I wasn't going crazy...

I isolated the problem to this one line in .config/cspell.json:

"ignorePaths": [".git/", "node_modules/", "pnpm-lock.yaml"]

When that is present, I get the incorrect behaviour.

I posted on the cspell repo.

[paduszyk]

@lonix1 cSpell filters out the 'ignorePaths from the input paths. If you ignore the entire .git dir, so .git/COMMIT_EDITMSG as well, then there is nothing to check by commit-msg.

That is why I prefer to stream the .git/COMMIT_EDITMSG file directly to the cSpell:

commit-msg:
  jobs:
    - name: cSpell
      run: |
        npm exec --no -- cspell --language-id=commit-msg stdin < "{1}"
    - name: commitlint
      only:
        - ref: main
      run: |
        npm exec --no -- commitlint --edit < "{1}"

Now cSpell spell checks the commit message as the and ignores .git folder at the same time.

Hope this helps.

[lonix1]

That's a cool idea but for me it doesn't work, I get:

Linter Error: Unhandled Error in Handler: fs:stat
exit status 1
🥊 spellcheck (2.14 seconds)