Getting mise to work with VS Code's Git interface

When setting up my new work laptop, I decided to give mise a spin as a version manager. I've used asdf in the past and found it very difficult to remember commands. mise sounded like a more ergonomically friendly tool, and a new laptop is the ideal time to try a new tool.

Most things so far have been very smooth. One was more of a struggle: getting a husky pre-commit hook working when committing through VS Code's Git interface.

Solution

Note that this is what worked for my project, and it might not for yours.

1. Add a ~/.huskyrc file. At least in my project, which was configured with husky v8, this is the global configuration file loaded by husky before every hook.
   • husky's docs say it should be a ~/.config/husky/init.sh file, and that ~/.huskyrc is deprecated. But I found that the former never actually executed. When I browsed the project's .husky folder, the script that runs at the beginning of my hook, which is not committed to git, was looking for ~/.huskyrc.
   • I'm assuming this means that the ~.huskyrc option was deprecated in v9, but I didn't take the time to confirm it.
   • I'm going to make the same change in both places, in case I run into a project using husky v9 that sets it up according to the v9 docs.
2. Activate mise in that file. This was not as straightforward as I expected it to be.
   • The mise docs do have a very early message telling you that you're going to have to deal with this problem, and that you should prefer to deal with it using shims:
     "For interactive shells, mise activate is recommended. In non-interactive sessions, like CI/CD, IDEs, and scripts, using shims might work best."
   • But the shims docs did not make it very clear how I could activate them in my script. Everything referenced calling mise directly, but in a non-interactive shell, mise is not activated.
   • You can find where mise is running from, using where mise. I got: /opt/homebrew/bin/mise (and an actual function definition).
   • Reference that directly to activate, like this:

     eval "$(/opt/homebrew/bin/mise activate --shims)"
     

Why this was a problem

VS Code's git window is executing in a shell session that doesn't load your shell profile, which is where you activate mise. In my case, the hook was calling npx lint-staged; npx was not a recognized command, because the shell had not run mise to hook up Node.

I'm not sure how I was getting around this with asdf previously, but I was. And I know that some users running nvm have this problem.

How not to fix this

In the past, I've merged PRs that included an nvm activation script in the pre-commit hook. This is great for nvm users, but I don't think the hook should be polluted for all users based on the preferences of some.

Now that I know the husky profile script exists, I think that's a better solution. I may update our docs to state this.