Use cspell in commit-msg hook via lefthook

[lonix1]

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

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

I'm using lefthook, so I converted that to a commit-msg hook like so:

commit-msg:
  jobs:
    - name: spellcheck
      run: pnpm exec cspell --no-must-find-files {1}

This should fail, but actually passes:

$ git commit -m 'asdfasdf'
[master 83913d1] asdfasdf
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

I'm also using cspell in a pre-commit hook to spellcheck actual files, and it works perfectly - so the issue is in the commit-msg hook only.

It seems like cspell is not receiving anything to check, but I know that {1} is correct, it is set to .git/COMMIT_EDITMSG

Is this a bug? Any suggestions?

[lonix1]

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. When removed, the hook works.

Is this a bug?

[Jason3S]

@lonix1,

The issue is ".git/". It prevents checking commit messages. This is related to #8937.

"ignorePaths": ["node_modules/", "pnpm-lock.yaml",
    ".git/{info,lfs,logs,refs,objects}/**",
    ".git/{index,*refs,*HEAD}"]

[lonix1]

Yes, that fixed it! It's so obvious and yet I didn't notice: ignoring .git/ means .git/COMMIT_EDITMSG was also ignored.

Note this doesn't work for some reason:

"ignorePaths": [
  ".git/",
  "!.git/COMMIT_EDITMSG",
  // ...
]

I assume you wrote a custom globber (for speed, to avoid dependencies) that stops traversing at .git/. Now I understand why the defaults have this:

".git/{info,lfs,logs,refs,objects}/**",
".git/{index,*refs,*HEAD}",

😄
I did some investigation though, and came up with an exhaustive set:

// cspell.json
{
  "ignorePaths": [
    ".git/{branches,hooks,info,lfs,logs,lost-found,modules,objects,rebase-*,refs,rr-cache,svn,worktrees}/**",
    ".git/{*.lock,*.log,*.pid,*.sock,*HEAD,config,description,index,packed-refs}",
    "node_modules/",
    "pnpm-lock.yaml",    
  ],
  // ...

I hope I'm not slowing down cspell by doing that!

For reference: the docs show a commit-msg hook using the "pre-commit" tool... in case anyone needs it, here is my working lefthook config:

# lefthook.yml
commit-msg:
  jobs:
    - run: pnpm exec cspell --no-progress --no-summary --no-must-find-files --language-id commit-msg {1}

[Jason3S]

@lonix1,

I suggest using the --file option since you already have full file paths.

commit-msg:
  jobs:
    - name: spellcheck
      run: pnpm exec cspell --no-must-find-files --file {1}

There are more examples here: https://github.com/streetsidesoftware/cspell-cli