pre-commit VS semgrep

Compare pre-commit vs semgrep and see what are their differences.

pre-commit

A framework for managing and maintaining multi-language pre-commit hooks. (by pre-commit)

semgrep

Lightweight static analysis for many languages. Find bug variants with patterns that look like source code. (by semgrep)
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pre-commit semgrep
191 71
11,837 9,603
2.7% 2.7%
8.1 9.9
7 days ago about 9 hours ago
Python OCaml
MIT License GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 only
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

pre-commit

Posts with mentions or reviews of pre-commit. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-13.
  • Implementing Quality Checks In Your Git Workflow With Hooks and pre-commit
    6 projects | dev.to | 13 Dec 2023
    # See https://pre-commit.com for more information # See https://pre-commit.com/hooks.html for more hooks repos: - repo: https://github.com/pre-commit/pre-commit-hooks rev: v3.2.0 hooks: - id: trailing-whitespace - id: end-of-file-fixer - id: check-yaml - id: check-toml - id: check-added-large-files - repo: local hooks: - id: tox lint name: tox-validation entry: pdm run tox -e test,lint language: system files: ^src\/.+py$|pyproject.toml|^tests\/.+py$ types_or: [python, toml] pass_filenames: false - id: tox docs name: tox-docs language: system entry: pdm run tox -e docs types_or: [python, rst, toml] files: ^src\/.+py$|pyproject.toml|^docs\/ pass_filenames: false - repo: https://github.com/pdm-project/pdm rev: 2.10.4 # a PDM release exposing the hook hooks: - id: pdm-lock-check - repo: https://github.com/jumanjihouse/pre-commit-hooks rev: 3.0.0 hooks: - id: markdownlint
  • Embracing Modern Python for Web Development
    12 projects | dev.to | 8 Dec 2023
    Pre-commit hooks act as the first line of defense in maintaining code quality, seamlessly integrating with linters and code formatters. They automatically execute these tools each time a developer tries to commit code to the repository, ensuring the code adheres to the project's standards. If the hooks detect issues, the commit is paused until the issues are resolved, guaranteeing that only code meeting quality standards makes it into the repository.
  • EmacsConf Live Now
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 2 Dec 2023
  • A Tale of Two Kitchens - Hypermodernizing Your Python Code Base
    31 projects | dev.to | 12 Nov 2023
    Pre-commit Hooks: Pre-commit is a tool that can be set up to enforce coding rules and standards before you commit your changes to your code repository. This ensures that you can't even check in (commit) code that doesn't meet your standards. This allows a code reviewer to focus on the architecture of a change while not wasting time with trivial style nitpicks.
  • Things I just don't like about Git
    6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Oct 2023
    Ah, fair enough!

    On my team we use pre-commit[0] a lot. I guess I would define the history to be something like "has this commit ever been run through our pre-commit hooks?". If you rewrite history, you'll (usually) produce commits that have not been through pre-commit (and they've therefore dodged a lot of static checks that might catch code that wasn't working, at that point in time). That gives some manner of objectivity to the "history", although it does depend on each user having their pre-commit hooks activated in their local workspace.

    [0]: https://pre-commit.com/

  • Django Code Formatting and Linting Made Easy: A Step-by-Step Pre-commit Hook Tutorial
    7 projects | dev.to | 4 Oct 2023
    Pre-commit is a framework for managing and maintaining multi-language pre-commit hooks. It supports hooks for various programming languages. Using this framework, you only have to specify a list of hooks you want to run before every commit, and pre-commit handles the installation and execution of those hooks despite your project’s primary language.
  • Git: fu** the history!
    2 projects | dev.to | 14 Sep 2023
    You can learn more here: pre-commit.com
  • [Tool Anouncement] github-distributed-owners - A tool for managing GitHub CODEOWNERS using OWNERS files distributed throughout your code base. Especially helpful for monorepos / multi-team repos
    2 projects | /r/github | 13 Sep 2023
    Note this includes support for pre-commit.
  • Packaging Python projects in 2023 from scratch
    2 projects | /r/Python | 6 Sep 2023
    As a nice next step, you could also add mypy to check your type hints are consistent, and automate running all this via pre-commit hooks set up with… pre-commit.
  • How to Write Impeccably Clean Code That Will Save Your Sanity
    7 projects | dev.to | 27 Jul 2023
    pre-commit is a framework that enables the execution of configurable checks or tasks on code changes prior to committing, providing a way to enforce code quality, formatting, and other project-specific requirements, thereby reducing potential issues and maintaining code consistency.

semgrep

Posts with mentions or reviews of semgrep. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-17.
  • Creating a DevSecOps pipeline with Jenkins — Part 1
    3 projects | dev.to | 17 Mar 2024
    For the SAST stage, I used SonarQube tool. SonarQube is an open-source platform developed by SonarSource for continuous inspection of code quality to perform automatic reviews with static analysis of code to detect bugs and code smells on more than 30 programming languages. I preferred SonarQube instead of other SAST tools because it has a detailed documentation and plugins about integration with Jenkins and SonarQube works with Java projects pretty well. Of course you can similar multi-language-supported tools such as Semgrep or language-specific tools such as Bandit.
  • Tree-Sitter
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Feb 2024
    > Not sure I understand your point.

    The problem is using Treesitter (for syntax highlighting and "semantic movements") and an LSP at the same time. So if your language has a LSP, using Treesitter additionally is redundant at best and introduces inconcistency at worst.

    I'm not talking about using Treesitter as the parser for the LSP.

    > Most popular languages have language-specific tools

    I'd say even less popular langauges like Coq^H^H^HRocq, Lean 4, Koka, Idris, Unison, ... have their "own" tools, I do not know of a language that uses a Treesitter parser in its LSP, but I do know about tools like https://semgrep.dev/ (written in OCaml) and Github's code search which use Treesitter.

  • AST-grep(sg) is a CLI tool for code structural search, lint, and rewriting
    15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Dec 2023
    Well, when I seach for "semgrep", I get a very nice corporate landing page with a "Book Demo" button. Which is a level of hassle that just isn't worth it for smaller teams, because "Book Demo" usually means "We're going to try to do a dance to see how much money we can extract from you." Which smaller teams may only want to do for a handful of key tools.

    (4 years ago, I was more willing to put up with enterprise licensing. But in the last two years, I've seen way too many enterprise vendors try to squeeze every penny they can get from existing clients. An enterprise sales process now often means "Expect 30% annual price hikes once you're in too deep to back out.")

    There's also an open source "semgrep" project here: https://github.com/semgrep/semgrep. But this seems to be basically a vulernability scanner, going by the README.

    Whereas AST-grep seems to focus heavily on things like:

    1. One-off searching: "Search my tree for this pattern."

    2. Refactoring: "Replace this pattern with this other pattern."

    AST-grep also includes a vulnerability scanning mode like semgrep.

    It's possible that semgrep also has nice support for (1) and (2), but it isn't clearly visible on their corporate landing page or the first open source README I found.

  • Top 10 Snyk Alternatives for Code Security
    3 projects | dev.to | 31 Aug 2023
    7. Semgrep
  • semgrep VS bearer - a user suggested alternative
    2 projects | 10 Jul 2023
  • Powerful SAST project for Android Application Security
    3 projects | /r/bugbounty | 21 Jun 2023
    This project is a compilation of Semgrep rules derived from the OWASP Mobile Application Security Testing Guide (MASTG) specifically for Android applications. The aim is to enhance and support Mobile Application Penetration Testing (MAPT) activities conducted by the ethical hacker community. The primary objective of these rules is to address the static tests outlined in the OWASP MASTG.
  • OCaml 5.0 Multicore is out
    19 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 16 Dec 2022
  • Do you SecDevOps?
    4 projects | /r/delphi | 16 Dec 2022
    For generally code analysis, I used Semgrep in the past.
  • Spring Actuator - Finding Actuators using Static Code Analysis - Part 2
    3 projects | dev.to | 28 Oct 2022
    For these cases, let me introduce you to my favorite static code analysis tool: semgrep. It's a free Open Source tool that you can install and use right now (it only starts costing money if you want to use their dashboard to view the results, which is entirely optional, and all code scanning runs on your device - code is never uploaded to any servers). As stated briefly, semgrep searches for code matching specific patterns, taking the semantics of the code into account (hence, semantic grep). You can use it for security checks based on a large set of detection rules curated by the semgrep community, but where it really shines is when you start writing rules for your own use cases.
  • Semgrep: Writing quick rules to verify ideas
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Oct 2022
    Good idea! I opened an issue here: https://github.com/returntocorp/semgrep/issues/6331

What are some alternatives?

When comparing pre-commit and semgrep you can also consider the following projects:

SonarQube - Continuous Inspection

snyk - Snyk CLI scans and monitors your projects for security vulnerabilities. [Moved to: https://github.com/snyk/cli]

codeql - CodeQL: the libraries and queries that power security researchers around the world, as well as code scanning in GitHub Advanced Security

Spotbugs - SpotBugs is FindBugs' successor. A tool for static analysis to look for bugs in Java code.

husky - Git hooks made easy 🐶 woof!

gitleaks - Protect and discover secrets using Gitleaks 🔑

ruff - An extremely fast Python linter and code formatter, written in Rust.

Poetry - Python packaging and dependency management made easy

pre-commit-golang - Pre-commit hooks for Golang with support for monorepos, the ability to pass arguments and environment variables to all hooks, and the ability to invoke custom go tools.

detect-secrets - An enterprise friendly way of detecting and preventing secrets in code.

lint-staged - 🚫💩 — Run linters on git staged files

markdownlint-cli - MarkdownLint Command Line Interface