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Differences from pre-commit

General differences

  • prek supports .pre-commit-config.yaml, .pre-commit-config.yml, and native prek.toml configuration files. Use prek util yaml-to-toml to convert an existing YAML config.
  • prek implements some common hooks from pre-commit-hooks in Rust for better performance.
  • prek supports repo: builtin for offline, zero-setup hooks.
  • prek uses ~/.cache/prek as the default cache directory for repos, environments and toolchains.
  • prek decouples hook environments from their repositories, allowing shared toolchains and environments across hooks.
  • prek supports language_version as a semver specifier and automatically installs the required toolchains.
  • prek supports files and exclude as glob lists (in addition to regex) via glob mappings. See Configuration Reference.
  • prek supports a shell hook option for explicit shell-source execution through predefined adapters such as bash, sh, and pwsh. Upstream pre-commit runs entry directly; shell behavior must be spelled into entry itself.
  • prek reports more precise configuration parsing errors, including exact source locations.

Behavioral divergences

These differences intentionally change upstream behavior instead of adding a compatible superset.

  • File identification gives recognized extensions precedence over loose filename-prefix matches. For example, makefile.png is treated as a PNG image, while upstream identify also gives it makefile and text tags. Exact filename matches such as Cargo.toml still keep their name-specific tags.

Workspace mode

prek supports workspace mode, allowing you to run hooks for multiple projects in a single command. Each subproject can keep its own prek.toml or .pre-commit-config.yaml file.

See Workspace Mode for more information.

Language support

See the dedicated Language Support page for a complete list of supported languages, prek-specific behavior, and unsupported languages.

Recent releases added support for more managed hook runtimes, including Bun, Julia, Deno, and experimental .NET support.

Command line interface

For a compatibility-focused command mapping, see Compatibility with pre-commit.

prek run

  • prek run [HOOK|PROJECT]... supports selecting or skipping multiple projects or hooks in workspace mode, instead of only accepting a single optional hook id. See Running Specific Hooks or Projects for details.
  • prek run can execute hooks in parallel by priority (hooks with the same priority may run concurrently), instead of strictly serial execution.
  • In workspace mode, prek run can execute independent projects at the same directory depth concurrently, while still running child projects before their parents.
  • prek provides dynamic completion for hook ids.
  • prek run --dry-run shows which hooks would run without executing them.
  • prek run --last-commit runs hooks on files changed by the last commit.
  • prek run --directory <DIR> runs hooks on a specified directory.
  • prek run --no-fail-fast lets you override the configured fail_fast setting for a single run and continue after failures.

prek install

  • prek install and prek uninstall honor repo-local and worktree-local core.hooksPath when choosing where to manage Git shims.

prek validate-config

  • prek validate-config accepts both prek.toml and .pre-commit-config.yaml.

prek list

prek list lists all available hooks, their ids, and descriptions. This provides a better overview of the configured hooks.

prek auto-update

  • prek auto-update updates all projects in the workspace to their latest revisions.
  • prek auto-update checks updates for the same repository only once, speeding up the process in workspace mode.
  • prek auto-update supports --dry-run to preview the updates without applying them.
  • prek auto-update supports --exit-code to exit non-zero when updates are available, and --check as an alias for --dry-run --exit-code.
  • prek auto-update validates pinned SHA revisions against fetched upstream refs, including impostor-commit detection, and keeps stale # frozen: comments in sync when it can.
  • prek auto-update supports the --cooldown-days option to skip releases newer than the specified number of days (based on the tag creation timestamp for annotated tags, or the tagged commit timestamp for lightweight tags).
  • prek auto-update supports --exclude-repo to skip selected repositories while updating everything else.
  • prek auto-update supports tag filtering with --include-tag, --exclude-tag, --repo-include-tag, and --repo-exclude-tag, using glob patterns to keep or remove matching tags before selecting an update.

prek sample-config

  • prek sample-config can generate either YAML or TOML and can write directly to a file with --file.

prek util

  • prek util identify shows the file-identification tags prek uses for filtering and debugging hook selection.
  • prek util list-builtins lists all built-in hooks bundled with prek.
  • prek util yaml-to-toml converts .pre-commit-config.yaml to prek.toml.

prek cache

  • prek groups cache maintenance under prek cache instead of separate top-level clean and gc commands.
  • prek cache gc removes unused cached repositories, environments and toolchains, and supports --dry-run.
  • prek cache clean removes all cached data.
  • prek cache dir and prek cache size help inspect the cache before or after cleanup.

Not implemented

The pre-commit hazmat subcommand introduced in pre-commit v4.5.0 is not implemented. This command is niche and unlikely to be widely used.