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Cookbook

Short recipes for setup patterns that go beyond the default project-local workflow.

Enable a Global Hook with Git Config

Git 2.54 introduced config-based hooks, which let Git run hooks from config instead of hook scripts. This is useful when you want a personal prek hook that works across repositories.

Choose the Git hook event you want to run on, for example pre-commit, then register a global config-based hook:

git config --global hook.prek-pre-commit.event pre-commit
git config --global hook.prek-pre-commit.command 'prek hook-impl --hook-type pre-commit --skip-on-missing-config --'

Edit your global Git config directly, for example in ~/.gitconfig:

[hook "prek-pre-commit"]
    event = pre-commit
    command = prek hook-impl --hook-type pre-commit --skip-on-missing-config --

The config has three moving parts:

  • hook.<friendly-name>.event: the Git hook event to listen for, such as pre-commit, pre-push, or commit-msg.
  • hook.<friendly-name>.command: the command Git runs for that event.
  • <friendly-name>: a user-defined name for this configured hook. Keep it unique in your Git config.

Keep these command options

Keep --skip-on-missing-config in the command so repositories without a prek.toml or .pre-commit-config.yaml do not fail ordinary Git operations.

Keep the trailing -- so Git-provided hook arguments, such as a commit-msg filename or pre-push remote name and URL, are forwarded to prek hook-impl instead of being parsed as hook selectors.

By default, prek hook-impl discovers the current repository's config. If you want one global hook config to run in every repository, pass that config explicitly:

git config --global hook.<friendly-name>.command 'prek hook-impl --hook-type <event> --config <config-file> --'

For example, a global config file at ~/.config/prek/global-hooks.toml can run gitleaks in every repository:

[[repos]]
repo = "https://github.com/gitleaks/gitleaks"
rev = "v8.24.2"
hooks = [{ id = "gitleaks" }]

Then point the global Git hook at that config:

git config --global hook.gitleaks.event pre-commit
git config --global hook.gitleaks.command 'prek hook-impl --hook-type pre-commit --config ~/.config/prek/global-hooks.toml --'