Review Just Your Changed Code

Review only the code in your current PR with Sourcery and incrementally improve the quality of your codebase.

Written by Reka Horvath on Oct 14, 2022

In the last weeks, we learned that several teams are in a similar situation:

They get a lot of recommendations from Sourcery.
They agree with these recommendations and regard them as technical debt 💵, but they don’t want to fix those issues right now.
They want to ensure they don’t introduce further code quality issues as their codebase evolves. => They want to see recommendations for the new code they’re just adding to the system.

To review only changed code, we introduced a new feature in version 0.12.11: the --diff option in the Sourcery CLI. You can provide here any command that returns a diff.

For example, if you want Sourcery to review only the code you haven’t committed yet:

sourcery review --diff "git diff" .

If you want to review your changes compared to the main branch:

sourcery review --diff "git diff main" .

Continuous Integration & Improvement

The new --diff option is also the best way to configure Sourcery in CI environments. You probably want to review the changes compared to the branch you want to merge into.

For example, for PRs to the main branch, you could set up a script like that in your CI:

pip install sourcery
# Store your Sourcery token as a secret in your CI environment.
sourcery login --token $SOURCERY_TOKEN
sourcery review --check --diff "git diff main" .

Pre-commit

Another way to catch code quality issues early is a pre-commit hook. Again, the recommended way to set this up is with the --diff option:

repos:
    - repo: https://github.com/sourcery-ai/sourcery
      rev: v1.12.0
      hooks:
          - id: sourcery
            # The best way to use Sourcery in a pre-commit hook
            # is to review only changed lines:
            args: [--diff=git diff HEAD, --no-summary]

Review Your Code with a Built-in Rule Package

With the finetuning opportunities of the --diff option, you can also consider introducing more advanced rules to your codebase.

You can write custom rules that are specific for your codebase.
You can review your code with a built-in rule package, like the Google Python Style Guide

sourcery review --enable google-python-style-guide .

Do you have some feedback to the new features? Do you have some ideas how Sourcery could help you improve your code and make it more maintainable? We’d love to hear your thoughts. Reach out on Twitter or via email at hello@sourcery.ai

Updates

pre-commit config: Add the --no-summary option.
Google Python Style Guide: Use --enable instead of --config