One clang-format version everywhere: pre-commit, CI and your laptop

A pull request fails the format check. The author runs clang-format -i locally, pushes, and it fails again with a different diff. Nothing is wrong with the code. The laptop has clang-format 18, CI installed 21 from a package repository last week, and the reviewer's editor plugin ships 19.

Every major LLVM release changes clang-format's output in small ways: new style options, changed defaults, fixed bugs. clang-tidy is worse, because new checks appear and old ones move between categories. Pinning the project version of a linter wrapper does not help if the wrapper pulls whatever clang happens to be around.

This is the problem the cpp-linter tools are built around: pick one LLVM major version and use it in every place code gets checked.

Pick the version once

Write it down somewhere visible, for example in CONTRIBUTING.md:

Formatting and static analysis use LLVM 21 (clang-format 21, clang-tidy 21).

Everything below pins 21. When you move to 22, change it in all places in one commit, reformat the tree in the same commit, and the history stays clean.

Pre-commit: cpp-linter-hooks

cpp-linter-hooks installs clang-format and clang-tidy as Python wheels, so every contributor gets the same binary regardless of what their distribution ships. The rev is the hooks release; the tool version is a separate --version argument:

.pre-commit-config.yaml

repos:
  - repo: https://github.com/cpp-linter/cpp-linter-hooks
    rev: v1.6.0
    hooks:
      - id: clang-format
        args: [--style=file, --version=21]
      - id: clang-tidy
        args: [--checks=.clang-tidy, --version=21]

--style=file and --checks=.clang-tidy read the same .clang-format and .clang-tidy files that CI will use, so there is one source of truth for the rules as well as for the version.

CI: cpp-linter-action

cpp-linter-action installs the requested version itself; the workflow does not need apt-get install clang-format-21 or a matching LLVM apt repository. The version input takes the LLVM major version:

.github/workflows/lint.yml

name: cpp-linter
on:
  pull_request:
    branches: [main]
  push:
    branches: [main]

jobs:
  cpp-linter:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions:
      contents: read
      pull-requests: write
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v5
      - uses: cpp-linter/cpp-linter-action@v2
        id: linter
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
        with:
          version: '21'
          style: file
          tidy-checks: ''
          thread-comments: ${{ github.event_name == 'pull_request' && 'update' }}
      - name: Fail on lint errors
        if: steps.linter.outputs.checks-failed > 0
        run: exit 1

style: file and an empty tidy-checks tell the action to use .clang-format and .clang-tidy from the repository, the same files pre-commit used a minute earlier on the developer's machine. The result is a thread comment on the pull request that is updated on every push instead of a new comment each time, plus file annotations in the diff view.

Local one-off runs: clang-tools

Sometimes you want the binary itself: a quick clang-format --dry-run over a directory, or a clang-tidy run with a hand-written compile database. clang-tools downloads a statically linked binary for the exact major version and falls back to the Python wheel when there is no binary for your platform:

pip install clang-tools
clang-tools install clang-format clang-tidy --version 21
clang-format-21 --version

The binaries come from clang-tools-static-binaries, which publishes LLVM 12 through 23 for Linux, macOS and Windows, on x86-64 and ARM64. The same release is what cpp-linter-action downloads in CI, so the bytes match.

Containers and other package managers

The same versions are available as Docker images tagged by major version:

docker run -v "$PWD":/src xianpengshen/clang-tools:21 clang-format --dry-run --Werror /src/main.cpp

The Homebrew tap and the asdf plugin are built from the same static binaries, for teams that already manage tool versions that way:

brew install cpp-linter/tap/clang-format@21 cpp-linter/tap/clang-tidy@21

Upgrading

When LLVM 22 is the version you want:

1. Change 21 to 22 in .pre-commit-config.yaml, the workflow and CONTRIBUTING.md.
2. Run pre-commit run clang-format --all-files and commit the reformatted tree together with the version change.
3. Open the pull request. cpp-linter-action runs with 22 and should report nothing, because the tree was formatted with the same version a moment ago.

If the action reports differences at this point, the two tools are not on the same version, and the numbers above are the first thing to check.

Why this matters more for clang-tidy

clang-format version drift produces noisy diffs. clang-tidy version drift produces different findings: checks that were added, renamed or made stricter. A pull request that passes locally and fails in CI with a check nobody has heard of is usually a version mismatch, not a code problem. Pinning the same major version in the hook and in the action turns "why does CI complain" into a deterministic question.