Recently, I have been maintaining forks for several projects that are no longer maintained. Usually, these are a pain to update, but I have found a workflow that takes the edge off by leveraging pre-commit.

My process:

  • Fork the project on GitHub to whichever organization I work with or my personal account.
  • Check out a local copy of my forked copy with git.
  • Install pre-commit
  • Create a .pre-commit-config.yaml with ZERO formatting or lint changes. This file will only include django-upgrade and pyupgrade hooks.

We skip the formatters and linters to avoid unnecessary changes if we want to open a pull request in the upstream project. If the project isn’t abandoned, we will want to do that.

  • For django-upgrade, change the—-target-version option to target the latest version of Django I’m upgrading to, which is currently 5.0.
  • For pyupgrade, update the python settings under default_language_version to the latest version of Python that I’m targetting. Currently, that’s 3.12.

The django-upgrade and pyupgrade projects attempt to run several code formatters and can handle most of the more tedious upgrade steps.

  • Run pre-commit autoupdate to ensure we have the latest version of our hooks.
  • Run pre-commit run --all-files to run pyupgrade and django-upgrade on our project.
  • Run any tests contained in the project and review all changes.
  • Once I’m comfortable with the changes, I commit them all via git and push them upstream to my branch.

Example .pre-commit-config.yaml config

From my experience, less is more with this bane bones .pre-commit-config.yaml config file.

# .pre-commit-config.yaml

default_language_version:
  python: python3.12

repos:
  - repo: https://github.com/asottile/pyupgrade
    rev: v3.15.1
    hooks:
      - id: pyupgrade

  - repo: https://github.com/adamchainz/django-upgrade
    rev: 1.16.0
    hooks:
      - id: django-upgrade
        args: [--target-version, "5.0"]

If I’m comfortable that the project is abandoned, I’ll add ruff support with a more opinionated config to ease my maintenance burden going forward.