Laravel Pint Automated Code Formatting: Pre-commit Hooks and GitHub Actions

Pint is a PHP code-style fixer that's specifically created to work with Laravel. In this tutorial, I will show you how it works and how to automate its launch before or after you commit code to the repository.

Installation

To install Pint, there's only one step - installing via Composer:

composer require laravel/pint --dev

And that's it! You're ready to use Pint.

Using Pint Locally with Git Hooks

One of the options to use Pint is pre-commit hooks. This is great for those, who want to push their code to the repository only when it's properly formatted. Here's what you need to do:

Create a file .git/hooks/pre-commit with the following content:

.git/hooks/pre-commit

#!/bin/sh
files=$(git diff --cached --name-only --diff-filter=ACM -- '*.php');
vendor/bin/pint $files -q
 
git add $files

Here's what this script does:

• Gets a list of .php files that were changed
• Runs Pint on those files
• Adds those files to the commit

This allows seamless integration with Git. Once you attempt to commit something - it will reformat the code and push it to the repository.

Using Pint with GitHub Actions

Another option for Pint usage is GitHub Actions. For those unfamiliar, I have a separate video Advanced Laravel Testing: CI/CD with GitHub Actions.

It will run a check on GitHub automatically which will format all the files and make a new commit. To get this working, you need to do the following:

Create a file .github/workflows/pint.yml with the following content:

.github/workflows/pint.yml

name: PHP Linting (Pint)
on:
  workflow_dispatch:
  push:
    branches-ignore:
      - 'dependabot/npm_and_yarn/*'
jobs:
  Pint:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions:
      contents: write
    steps:
      - uses: shivammathur/setup-php@15c43e89cdef867065b0213be354c2841860869e
        with:
          php-version: '8.1'
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - name: Copy .env
        run: php -r "file_exists('.env') || copy('.env.example', '.env');"
      - name: Install Dependencies
        run: composer install -q --no-ansi --no-interaction --no-scripts --no-progress --prefer-dist
      - name: Launch Pint inspection
        run: vendor/bin/pint
 
      - name: Commit changes
        uses: stefanzweifel/git-auto-commit-action@v4
        with:
          commit_message: PHP Linting (Pint)
          skip_fetch: true

Here's what we are doing here:

• We are using the shivammathur/setup-php action to install the PHP
• We are using the actions/checkout action to checkout the code
• Copying .env file if it doesn't exist (just in case you want to do more than just Pint with this job)
• Installing dependencies with Composer
• Running Pint
• Committing changes with commit message PHP Linting (Pint)

Once you commit this file, you should see that there's a new job in your Actions tab:

Clicking on it will give you all the information about the job:

And finally, you should see a new commit in your repository:

That's it! Now all your commits will be properly formatted after a push. Just don't forget to pull them!