I was recently introduced to pre-commit, and I really dig it. It’s a great way to double-check basic linting and validity in things without having to run a full build/test cycle.

Something I commonly do is sort JSON files using json-stable-stringify. I even wrote a VS Code extension to do just that. The problem with it being locked in the VS Code extension is that it’s not something I can use to verify formatting or invoke outside of the editor, so I set out to fix that. The result: @tillig/json-sort-cli.

This is a command-line wrapper around json-stable-stringify which adds a couple of features:

• It obeys .editorconfig - which is also something the VS Code plugin does.
• It can warn when something isn’t formatted (the default behavior) or autofix it if you want.
• It supports JSON with comments (using json5 for parsing) but it will remove those comments on format.

I put all of that together and included configuration for pre-commit so you can either run it manually via CLI or have it automatically run at pre-commit time.

I do realize there is already a pretty-format-json hook, but the above features I mentioned are differentiators. Why not just submit PRs to enhance the existing hook? The existing hook is in Python (not a language I’m super familiar with) and I really wanted - explicitly - the json-stable-stringify algorithm here, which I didn’t want to have to re-create in Python. I also wanted to add .editorconfig support and ability to use json5 to parse, which I suppose is all technically possible in Python but not a hill I really wanted to climb. Also, I wanted to offer a standalone CLI, which isn’t something I can do with that hook.

This is my first real npm package I’ve published, and I did it without TypeScript (I’m not really a JS guy, but to work with pre-commit you need to be able to install right from the repo), so I’m pretty pleased with it. I learned a lot about stuff I haven’t really dug into in the past - from some new things around npm packaging to how to get GitHub Actions to publish the package (with provenance) on release.

If this sounds like something you’re into, go check out how you can install and start using it!