Pre-commit Ruff Locks: Pin to CI or Accept 2-Week Drift

Lock Ruff and Watch CI Break Three Weeks Later

Pinning Ruff to an exact version in your pre-commit config sounds responsible. It stops your local hooks from breaking when Ruff releases a new rule. But here's what actually happens: three weeks later, your CI runs a fresher Ruff version, flags violations your local setup missed, and now you're fixing "new" lint errors in code that passed pre-commit yesterday.

I've seen this exact pattern in a dozen repos using Ruff + pre-commit. The version drift window keeps growing—Ruff ships releases every 2-3 weeks, and the gap between your locked local hook and the latest CI check becomes a 6-8 week lag by the time someone notices. That's enough time for 3-4 new rules to land, meaning "passing" commits suddenly fail in CI.

The alternative—letting Ruff auto-update in pre-commit—means developers get surprise lint failures on git commit after a hook refresh. Both options feel broken, but one breaks locally (fixable before push), the other breaks in CI (blocks merges). Let's figure out which pain is worth taking.

Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels

---

Continue reading the full article on TildAlice