ick

What it is and what it does

Ick centralizes code quality and best-practice checks that would otherwise be scattered across pre-commit hooks, CI workflows, wiki pages, and one-off scripts. Instead of wiring the same checks into every repository individually, you write rules once in a central repository and run them against any target repo you need to audit. Rules can be simple checks (exit with a status code) or include auto-fixes; they can be written in any language and run in parallel by default.

The tool is designed for teams, projects, or individual developers who maintain multiple repositories and want to enforce consistent standards across them without per-repo configuration. It supports filtering rules by tags, reproducing results locally for debugging, and tracking compliance across many repos. When best practices evolve—a new scanner ships, or a deprecated API needs removal—you update the rule once rather than in every repository.

Use it for:

• A security team publishes a rule to scan GitHub Actions workflows with a tool like zizmor across all company repos without adding it to each repo individually.
• An ML project enforces rules about approved model licenses or dependencies across multiple experiment repositories.
• A developer maintains hobby-horse style rules (e.g., text files must end with a newline) and applies them consistently across personal projects.
• A platform team checks that all repos have adopted a new Python version or removed a deprecated API, reporting which repos are compliant and which need work.
• A project runs checks before release that verify documentation is up to date, changelog is populated, and version numbers are consistent.

Worth the install?

AI-flagged interpretation of the facts on this page — verify before relying

Ick is a polyglot tool for bundling best practices as versioned, runnable rules and checking any number of repos against them—with or without auto-fixes.

Yes, if you maintain multiple repositories and want to enforce consistent checks without duplicating configuration in each one. The permissive MIT license, active maintenance, low install friction, and lack of known vulnerabilities make it safe to adopt. Best suited for teams or developers with strong opinions about code quality who want a single source of truth for rules. Not necessary if you only maintain one or two repos or rely entirely on pre-commit and CI for enforcement.

Install

ick on PyPI

pip install ick

uv add ick

poetry add ick

Installing ick

Before you install

Low install friction: pure Python wheel with no compiled dependencies. Active maintenance—last commit 2026-08-12, released 2026-07-24. Requires Python 3.11+.

License in practice

MIT license (permissive): you can use, modify, and distribute ick freely in commercial and private projects without restriction.

Quickstart

pip install ick

ick run --rules <path-to-rules-repo> <target-repo>

# Or test rules locally:
ick test-rules --rules <path-to-rules-repo>

Requires Python 3.11 or later.

Verify before relying

• Whether rules can be authored in languages other than Python and how that integration works in practice.
• Performance characteristics when running against large numbers of repos or with very large rulesets.
• How incremental re-running of rules based on changed inputs is configured and what inputs are tracked.

Package facts

Evidence: ick-0.12.0-py3-none-any.whl

Tags

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