YAPF Formatting on Commits

Question

I am currently working on a tool being used for Python developers, who use Spyder IDE. We want a consistent format. They are not willing to change IDE's that have plugins to automatically do this.

I have been testing the YAPF library, and am looking to find a way that anytime that a commit or push happens to GitLab, it automatically formats it in this way.

Do I need some workflow? Is this considered simular to CI Pipelines? I am unsure how to tackle this.

Any feedback is helpful, and greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I have been testing the YAPF library, and am looking to find a way that anytime that a commit or push happens to GitLab, it automatically formats it in this way.

You don't want to do that: you don't want your CI environment to modify commits, because either (a) you'll end up duplicating every commit with a second "fix the formatting commit", or (b) you'll make the history of your gitlab repository diverge from the history of the person who submitted the change (if you replace the commit).

The typical solution here is to update your CI to reject pull-/merge-requests that don't meet your formatting standards. At the same time, provide developers with a tool they can run locally that will apply the correct formatting to files before they submit a change request.

If your developers are committing directly to the repository, rather than operating through merge requests, your options are far more limited (at that point, you have a social problem, not a technical problem).