Two Ways to Share Git Hooks with Your Team
May 2017
Git hooks are a useful feature that can be used to manage the integrity of your source repository. On my current project, I wanted to ensure that all my Go source files were formatted correctly before allowing them to be committed.
Fortunately for me, there is a simple hook available that I can save as
.git/hooks/pre-commit to make this happen.
This works well for my purposes, but I wanted to make it as simple as possible when sharing with the rest of the team. This Stack Overflow post gives a couple of possibilities that I’ll go into more depth about.
Create Your Managed Hooks Directory
Since the .git directory isn’t versioned, I created .githooks at the root
where all these hooks live. You can choose whatever makes the most sense for
your project. Remember that when adding hooks they must be executable, so make
sure you chmod +x each of them to make that happen. Otherwise, you’ll tear
your hair out when you think they should run but they don’t.
Choose Your Sharing Strategy
If you’re using Git version 2.9 or greater, this is as simple as setting
the core.hooksPath configuration variable to your managed hooks directory:
$ git config core.hooksPath .githooks
If you’re using an earlier version, you need to ensure that your managed hooks
make it into the .git/hooks directory. I think symlinking is a good way to go,
just make sure to clear the old ones out first:
$ find .git/hooks -type l -exec rm {} \; && find .githooks -type f -exec ln -sf ../../{} .git/hooks/ \;
Share With Your Team
That takes care of your local configuration, but each team member will need to
ensure the hooks are in the right place in their local repository each time they
do a new checkout. I like to just put this into my Makefile and include it
into my general project setup. Here are the two variations expressed as make
targets:
init:
git config core.hooksPath .githooks
init:
find .git/hooks -type l -exec rm {} \;
find .githooks -type f -exec ln -sf ../../{} .git/hooks/ \;
A version of this article first appeared on the Viget blog