pre-commit won't run stage commit-msg local hooks

I'm having great difficulty making something that seems simple and logical but doesn't work.

As part of a GitHub repository with Python code, I want to manage a pre-commit that will launch a python script (to check the commit message if there's a keyword).

I use a Makefile (i'm on MacOS) to manage the config :

config:
    @echo "Install Git Hooks dependencies"
    python3 -m venv env \
      && source env/bin/activate \
      && pip install pre-commit
    pre-commit install --config .pre-commit-config.yaml

We can see in the 2 last rows of the output that pre-commit is correctly installed :

pre-commit install
pre-commit installed at .git/hooks/pre-commit

When the configuration is created, I activate the virtual environment:

source env/bin/activate

In the event of modification, I make my commit and everytime, the commit-msg won't start. If I change the stage commit-msg to commit, the script will start but fail because it's supposed to retreive the message...

% git commit -m "Testing"
check yaml...............................................................Passed
debug statements (python)............................(no files to check)Skipped
fix end of files.........................................................Passed
trim trailing whitespace.................................................Passed
[main c8982a3] Testing
 3 files changed, 11 insertions(+), 4 deletions(-)

The pre-commit is launched, and we can see that it executes a local .sh script (which just returns a “Hello world”), but it never executes the python script.

I've tried absolutely everything with the arguments:

always_run: true # tired with false and without the arg always_run
pass_filenames: false # tired with true and without the arg pass_filename

Here is the .pre-commit-config.yaml

repos:
  - repo: local
    hooks:
      - id: validate-commit-message
        name: Validate Commit Message
        language: python
        entry: python commit_validation.py
        always_run: false
        pass_filenames: false
        stages: [commit-msg]
      - id: echo-hello
        name: Echo Hello
        entry: echo_hello.sh
        language: script
        always_run: true
        pass_filenames: false
        stages: [commit-msg]
  - repo: https://github.com/pre-commit/pre-commit-hooks
    rev: v4.6.0
    hooks:
      - id: check-yaml
      - id: debug-statements
      - id: end-of-file-fixer
      - id: trailing-whitespace

Even if I use pre-commit run --all-files the commit-msg won't be triggered.

At this point, i'm totally lost.

Any ideas ?

Solution

If you want to run pre-commit on commit messages, you need to install the commit-msg hook:

pre-commit install -t commit-msg

Unrelated to your question, but note that there is a problem with the Makefile fragment you show in your question:

config:
    @echo "Install Git Hooks dependencies"
    python3 -m venv env \
      && source env/bin/activate \
      && pip install pre-commit
    pre-commit install --config .pre-commit-config.yaml

Each virtual line in a target runs in a separate subshell. That means the final pre-commit install ... command isn't impacted by the source env/bin/activate command in the previous line. If pre-commit is running successfully, that suggests you've got it installed somewhere other than your virtual environment.