Automatically pretty JSON files for clean git commit diffs using git hooks
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Original Source
- Original title: Automatically pretty JSON files for clean git commit diffs using git hooks
- Original author: Aloe Guvner
- Original date: April 19, 2019
- Source thread: https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/threads/automatically-pretty-json-files-for-clean-git-commit-diffs-using-git-hooks.108122/
- Source forum path: Game Development Engines > RPG Maker Tutorials > RMMV Tutorials
Summary
(This tutorial and others are available in their original format here) Background: Git is a powerful Version Control System that keeps track of differences in files as well as facilitating collaboration between team members. This isn't a git tutorial, but a tutorial to address an annoyance that people face when using git to work collaboratively on an RPG Maker MV project. Several of the data files in RPG Maker don't save in a nice, pretty format (Systems.json is one in particular).
Archived First Post
(This tutorial and others are available in their original format here)
Background:
Git is a powerful Version Control System that keeps track of differences in files as well as facilitating collaboration between team members. This isn't a git tutorial, but a tutorial to address an annoyance that people face when using git to work collaboratively on an RPG Maker MV project.
Several of the data files in RPG Maker don't save in a nice, pretty format (Systems.json is one in particular).
This causes the git diffs to become cluttered with useless information since all of the text will be on one line, so you can't tell what was actually changed. In addition, the diffs themselves can become large (in terms of bytes).
Pre-requisites:
How to do it:
We're going to use a built-in feature of git called "git hooks". There are a variety of hooks available, the one we are going to use is a "pre-commit" hook. This hook runs before the commit action happens.
The hook can execute in basically any language, the default is shell or bash but it's very common to use ruby and python. In this example, we're going to use Javascript.
In order to make use of the pre-commit hook, we need to do the following things:
The code:
Note the code below.
Conclusion:
Save the code above inside your ".git/hooks" folder in your project directory as "pre-commit". So the full path to that file is ".git/hooks/pre-commit" (note: there's no file extension, it's not "pre-commit.js" it's just "pre-commit")
Now this script will run every time files are committed, which will convert the JSON to pretty JSON with spacing and line breaks, so that the differences can be seen in git.
Background:
Git is a powerful Version Control System that keeps track of differences in files as well as facilitating collaboration between team members. This isn't a git tutorial, but a tutorial to address an annoyance that people face when using git to work collaboratively on an RPG Maker MV project.
Several of the data files in RPG Maker don't save in a nice, pretty format (Systems.json is one in particular).
This causes the git diffs to become cluttered with useless information since all of the text will be on one line, so you can't tell what was actually changed. In addition, the diffs themselves can become large (in terms of bytes).
Pre-requisites:
- Git is installed on your computer
- NodeJS is installed on your computer
- If you're on Windows, install it from the official NodeJS website
- If you're on Mac, install it with Homebrew. It's so much easier than the official downloadable and it sets the appropriate permissions on your directories
How to do it:
We're going to use a built-in feature of git called "git hooks". There are a variety of hooks available, the one we are going to use is a "pre-commit" hook. This hook runs before the commit action happens.
The hook can execute in basically any language, the default is shell or bash but it's very common to use ruby and python. In this example, we're going to use Javascript.
In order to make use of the pre-commit hook, we need to do the following things:
- Identify the JSON files that we want to pretty
- Read the file into memory as a string
- Parse the string into a Javascript object
- Stringify the object back into a string, but with nice line breaks and spacing
- Write that string back to the file
- Add the file to git tracking again (since it has changed from the hook)
- Exit with code 0 if successful, exit with code 1 and print the error if not successful
The code:
Note the code below.
Code:
#!/usr/bin/env node
const files = ['data/System.json'] // add all JSON files here to pretty
const fs = require('fs')
const { exec } = require('child_process')
try {
files.forEach(file => {
// Load file, pretty the JSON, and write it back
const json = fs.readFileSync(`./${file}`)
fs.writeFileSync(`./${file}`, JSON.stringify(JSON.parse(json), null, 2))
// Add the file back to the staging since it changed
exec(`git add ${file}`, (err, stdout, stderr) => {
if (err) {
console.error(err)
process.exit(1)
}
console.log(`stdout: ${stdout}`)
console.log(`stderr: ${stderr}`)
process.exit(0)
})
})
} catch (err) {
console.error(err)
process.exit(1)
}Conclusion:
Save the code above inside your ".git/hooks" folder in your project directory as "pre-commit". So the full path to that file is ".git/hooks/pre-commit" (note: there's no file extension, it's not "pre-commit.js" it's just "pre-commit")
Now this script will run every time files are committed, which will convert the JSON to pretty JSON with spacing and line breaks, so that the differences can be seen in git.
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