After reading a post by Bryce Verdier, and inspired by comments that suggested the Python version of said hook script would not be as nice as the bash version I decided to hack up a quick python version of the same script using pyflakes instead of pylint.

#!/usr/bin/env python
#-*- mode: python -*-
from subprocess import Popen, PIPE
import sys
syntax_checker = "pyflakes"


def run(command):
    p = Popen(command.split(), stdout=PIPE, stderr=PIPE)
    p.wait()
    return p.returncode, p.stdout.read().strip().split(), p.stderr.read()


_, files_modified, _= run("git diff-index --name-only HEAD")
for fname in files_modified:
    if fname.endswith(".py"):
        print >>sys.stderr, "Checking syntax on %s: ... "%(fname,),
        exit_code, _, errors = run("%s %s"%(syntax_checker, fname))
        if exit_code != 0:
            print >>sys.stderr, "\rChecking syntax on %s: FAILED! \n%s"%(fname, errors)
            sys.exit(exit_code)
        else:
            print >>sys.stderr, "\rChecking syntax on %s: OK!"%(fname,)

You can download / fork this here if would like to give it a try: https://gist.github.com/1214061 And of course, if you’re like me and you have no idea what to do with this script you can just do the following:

cp pre-commit.py YourGitProject/.git/hooks/pre-commitchmod +x YourGitProject/.git/hooks/pre-commit

It’s also worth noting that this version is currently really strict. ANY warnings will cause your commit to fail.  Of course, replacing pyflakes with pylint again is a simple modification of the syntax_checker variable in the above script.