Automatically format your Apex on every commit

Charlie Jonas

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Nov 13 · 2 min read

If you aren’t already using Prettier for Apex, I highly recommend you try it out. Even though it doesn’t always format exactly as I would, the consistency and convenience of auto-formatting makes it more than worth it.

It’s easy enough to set up vscode to format on save, but we can take this a step further by running prettier on the pre-commit hook. This will ensure that code is always formatted before being committed.

And since we already have a package.json in our project, setup is extremely simple:

Steps

1. npm i -D husky pretty-quick
2. In package.json add the following:
3. Add “apexInsertFinalNewline”: false, to your .prettierrc config. (explanation)

"husky": {
  "hooks": {
    "pre-commit": "pretty-quick --staged"
  }
}

That’s it, We’re done!

husky is a tool that makes git hooks dead simple (as you can see) and pretty-quick allows you to run prettier on only staged files.

One more thing…

In order to keep a bunch of formatting changes out of your pull requests, I recommend running prettier one time for everything.

You can easily do so by running:
npx prettier — write 'src/**/*.{trigger,cls}' .

Keep in mind, this will likely change a bunch of lines in every single apex file. It’s probably best to wait until you don’t have any divergent branches, otherwise you might have a tough time dealing with merge conflicts.

Once you’ve done this, you will very rarely see a “formatting only” change in git again!

-Happy coding

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