Local development improvement - pre-push hook

[weronikaolejniczak]

📝 Description

We've been discussing ways to improve the local development experience, especially regarding the pre-push Git hook that currently runs full test suites before allowing a push.

🙌 Goal

We want to strike a balance between local speed and code quality, and land on a solution the whole team is comfortable with. Whether we simplify the hooks, improve their logic, or restructure the workflow, your input is key.

Please share your thoughts, preferences, concerns, or ideas! 💬

🚧 Current Issues

• Performance: Full test suite can take several minutes, affecting developer flow. Running all tests pre-push slows us down considerably especially when having to switch between branches efficiently and flexibly. changedSince doesn't work consistently. Quick iterations or commits (even for minor changes like EUI+, ESLint plugin, or chores) are hindered.
• Redundancy: CI already asserts tests and linting, making local checks feel unnecessary. On the other hand, it's a cost-effective way to quickly verify that tests do not break and it doesn't force you to remember about running them locally or waiting until the CI finishes running.
• Breakages: Building packages locally can break unrelated packages (like EUI+).

✅ Proposed Options

ℹ️ Some of the options are exclusive, most can be done independently and together could lead to overall better result.

Option	Impact	Workload	Notes
1. Remove pre-push tests entirely	🔴 High	🟢 Low	Significantly improves local speed; simple to implement; risk of missing issues before CI; not cost-effective, puts the burden on CI.
2. Move linting/formatting to pre-commit	🟠 Medium-High	🟡 Low-Medium	Catches style issues earlier; helps maintain clean commits; adds consistency.
3. Optimize pre-push to run relevant tests only	🔴 High	🟠 Medium-High	Greatly reduces runtime while preserving safety; requires scripting logic, maintenance, and consensus; defining test dependents, running tests conditionally, leveraging changedSince (it doesn't work consistently).
4. Investigate and fix cross-package breakages (e.g., EUI+ issues)	🔴 High	🔴 High	Would address the root cause of slow dev time and breakages for website; deeper and more complex fix.
5. Use watch mode during development	🟠 Medium	🟢 Low	Optional for individuals; helps catch issues early but doesn’t address core problems with hooks.
6. Improve long-running tests	🟠 Medium	🟠 Medium-High	Makes the test execution time smaller.
7. Increase maxWorker value	🟠 Medium	🟢 Low	Helps split into more processes; risk of running into timeouts and limited resource issue on a local machine.

[weronikaolejniczak]

There are two issues here:

• packages/website fails on pre-push because packages/eui-theme-borealis rebuilds its dependencies
• pre-push tests and rebuilds of unrelated packages take a long time, changedSince doesn't work consistently

For example, a small change in packages/website took over 3 minutes to push:
git push --set-upstream origin testy-test 203.95s user 32.67s system 122% cpu 3:13.59 total

It could make contributing to EUI a frustrating experience, especially for designers that only want to add a pattern page to packages/website.

Meanwhile, linting only took seconds:
yarn lint 11.92s user 1.69s system 157% cpu 8.636 total

Fixing the first issue won’t address the second. However, removing pre-push tests would avoid unnecessary rebuilds and prevent breaking other workspaces. We could shift to pre-commit linting / formatting for cleaner commits instead.

Personally, I use the VSCode Jest extension with watch mode, or you can run:
yarn workspace @elastic/eui test-unit --watch

It’s a solid dev workflow.

Also, being able to push frequently (even WIP) is important. Long push times discourage that and increase risk.

[JasonStoltz]

My recommendation is:

• Move linting to pre-commit
• Remove test runs entirely

If we decide we miss it, we can always revert it, right? Worth a shot.

[weronikaolejniczak]

The majority of the team is for:

1. removing pre-push hook,
2. moving linting and formatting to pre-commit hook.

I created a ticket to implement the change: https://github.com/elastic/eui/issues/8604