Ready prek go!

I’ve been using prek recently as a drop-in replacement for pre-commit.

It uses uv for managing Python virtual environments and dependencies, is rewritten in Rust (because of course) and uses the same .pre-commit-config.yaml as pre-commit.

Its homepage says it’s not yet production ready, but several projects like Apache Airflow and PDM are already using it. I’ve been using it for a while and reporting issues as I find them; the maintainer is quick with fixes and releases. All the hooks I need are now supported.

Getting started #

First install using one of the many methods, then:

cd my-repo
pre-commit uninstall       # remove the old hooks
prek install               # install the new hooks
prek run --all-files       # run all lints on all files
git commit -m "my commit"  # run on the changed files in a commit

Benchmarks #

prek is noticeably quicker at installing hooks.

• ⚡ About 10x faster than pre-commit and uses only a third of disk space.

This 10x is a comparison of installing hooks using the excellent hyperfine benchmarking tool.

Here’s my own comparison.

• In the first test, I initially ran pre-commit clean or prek clean to clear their caches. I then ran each tool with run --all-files in serial on the 126 repos I have cloned right now, 84 of which have a .pre-commit-config.yaml file. Each then downloads and installs the hooks when needed, then runs the lint tools.

• Second, because running the lint tools should be independent and constant time for both tools, the next test ran install-hooks instead of run --all files.

  To get an idea of the amount of work for these two tests, pre-commit reported initialising environments 217 times.

• Finally, let’s run hyperfine on the Pillow config, which installs hooks from 14 repos:

❯ hyperfine \
--prepare 'rm -rf ~/.cache/prek/ && rm -rf ~/.cache/pre-commit && rm -rf ~/.cache/uv' \
--setup 'prek --version && pre-commit --version' \
'prek install-hooks' \
'pre-commit install-hooks'

Results #

The hyperfine results:

Benchmark 1: prek install-hooks
  Time (mean ± σ):      5.539 s ±  0.176 s    [User: 8.973 s, System: 5.692 s]
  Range (min … max):    5.231 s …  5.834 s    10 runs

Benchmark 2: pre-commit install-hooks
  Time (mean ± σ):     39.841 s ±  2.017 s    [User: 19.760 s, System: 8.203 s]
  Range (min … max):   36.930 s … 43.976 s    10 runs

Summary
  prek install-hooks ran
    7.19 ± 0.43 times faster than pre-commit install-hooks

Give it a try and give it a ⭐!

Header photo: AH-1G Aircraft Maintenance Test Flight Handbook and handwritten checklist for helicopters in the San Diego Air and Space Museum Archive, with no known copyright restrictions.