Deep Dive into Git Hooks

Like many other Version Control Systems, Git has a way to fire off custom scripts when certain important actions occur. There are two groups of these hooks: client side and server side. The client-side hooks are for client operations such as committing and merging. The server-side hooks are for Git server operations such as receiving pushed commits. You can use these hooks for all sorts of reasons, and you’ll learn about a few of them here.

Installing a Hook

The hooks are all stored in the hooks subdirectory of the Git directory. In most projects, that’s .git/hooks. By default, Git populates this directory with a bunch of example scripts, many of which are useful by themselves; but they also document the input values of each script. All the examples are written as shell scripts, with some Perl thrown in, but any properly named executable scripts will work fine — you can write them in Ruby or Python or what have you. These example hook files end with .sample; you’ll need to rename them.

To enable a hook script, put a file in the hooks subdirectory of your Git directory that is named appropriately and is executable. From that point forward, it should be called. I’ll cover most of the major hook filenames here.

Client-Side Hooks

There are a lot of client-side hooks. This section splits them into committing-workflow hooks, e-mail-workflow scripts, and the rest of the client-side scripts
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Rajesh Kumar
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