share your git hooks and config

How to share your git hooks and config with your team members and put them under version control

Demo

# change your 'core.hookspath' to the tracked 'hooks' directory
$ git config --global core.hookspath hooks

# clone the repository
$ git clone https://github.com/stefanhoelzl/commit-git-hooks-and-config
$ cd commit-git-hooks-and-config

# use the custom alias defined in .gitconfig
$ git head-ref
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx refs/remotes/origin/HEAD

# use the custom pre-commit hook in hooks
$ touch test
$ git commit -a -m"test git hook"
About to commit using tracked git hook
[master d330c48] test git hook
 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-)

Details

Let's start with the git hooks

Since it would be a security vulnerability to just allow random git hooks to be executed on your system we need to set one global git configuration value:

git config --global core.hookspath <your-hooks-path>

where <your-hooks-path> is relative to your repository root. This allows git hooks to be stored in a tracked directory. You can also save this in your local config, but then you have to set it for every repository you clone.

Now you can put all your git hooks into <your-hooks-path> and have them tracked and shared with your team members.

To be sure there is no malicous software hidden in the hooks coming with this repository check them out in hooks directory.

How to use this to share our git configuration?

Now that we can have a shared post-checkout git hook we can use this to set a include.path to our custom git configuration file.

So create a post-checkout hooks in <your-hooks-path>:

# content of <your-hooks-path>/post-checkout
git config --local include.path ../<your-gitconfig>

Now you can create a <your-gitconfig> file in your repo and the post-checout hook will enforce that your team members work every time with the correct gitconfig.