Intro

When producing the contents of this blog I’ m generating Markdown files and then letting the Hexo framework generate the html static files. However I’m very lazy and need to improve the both the grammar of the articles and the Markdown format.

In this article I will explain how to setup a git pre-hook to validate the Markdown format, oh! and fix all the issues on pre existing articles.

What is Markdownlint

A tool to check markdown files and flag style issues.

• https://github.com/markdownlint/markdownlint

How to check issues locally

You can use a docker run on a given path like the following example

docker run --rm -v ${PWD}:/data markdownlint/markdownlint source

or run directly the mdl command.

You may check the available rules here.

For Hexo in particular I add metadata which does not comply with some of the rules such as MD002,MD013 and MD032, the same applies for line length as the data will be converted to HTML, I would skip some of the tests and would run like:

mdl -r ~MD002,~MD013,~MD032,~MD005,~MD009 source

How to fix the issues

You can install markdownlint on your IDE eg for vscode markdownlint and fix based on the hints.

Configure git pre-hook

Now let’s configure a git pre-commit hook to validate Markdown lint before we commit.

pre-commit install

In order to test this without committing there is a nice python tool that you can use

sudo pacman -S python-pre-commit

If you are using a different distribution you might just need to :

pip install pre-commit

Also make sure you have markdownlint installed unless you want to use the docker version.

NOTE: If that is the case you need to change the id to id: markdownlint-docker on the following file

Create the following file .pre-commit-config.yaml with the content

# See https://pre-commit.com for more information
# See https://pre-commit.com/hooks.html for more hooks
repos:
-   repo: https://github.com/igorshubovych/markdownlint-cli
    rev: v0.41.0    
    hooks:
    -   id: markdownlint
        args: [ --disable=MD013, --disable=MD002,--disable=MD032,--disable=MD005,--disable=MD009 ]

Then execute the following command

pre-commit install

This will install the hook configuration. Check the documentation page as there are several hooks that might be useful.

You can now test if the tests are passing before committing

pre-commit run --all-files

If you get something similar you are good to go.

$ pre-commit run --all-files
markdownlint.............................................................Passed

Exit codes

markdownlint-cli returns one of the following exit codes:

0: Program ran successfully
1: Linting errors
2: Unable to write -o/–output output file
3: Unable to load -r/–rules custom rule
4: Unexpected error (e.g. malformed config)

You are now ready to commit with a pre-hook that checks MD lint

Conclusion

Pre-hooks are very valuable as they can automate, enhance your commit, crosscheck business rules, lint, grammar or formatting in order to guarantee that your commit will bring the best value as possible. There are lots of hooks available check them out. pre-commit command is useful as would allow you to test all those scripts before doing the changes on the repo.

References

• https://github.com/markdownlint/markdownlint/tree/main
• https://pre-commit.com/hooks
• https://pre-commit.com/