Hooks

Overview

Hooks are scripts that automatically run at certain git repository events.

There are two types of hooks:

Local Hooks: for events related to committing or checking-out to your local repo
Server Hooks: for events related to pushing changes to the remote server
- Note that tasks accomplished via server hooks can (and arguably should) be accomplished by the build/automation server instead

All hooks are located in the .git/hooks folder.

The .git folder is located in the root directory of the repo
Note that this is a hidden folder, so make sure those are shown in your file explorer

Many sample hooks are pre-populated within the .git/hooks folder to use as a starting point.

They are all of the ".sample" file extension
To activate a pre-made hook for your repo, simply remove the ".sample" file extension

Overview of commonly used local hooks:

pre-commit
- Runs before you attempt to commit to the repository
- Useful for code quality checks (whitespace errors, modules OK not monitored, etc)
prepare-commit-msg
- Runs after pre-commit
- Useful for prepopulating commit messages
commit-msg
- Runs after the commit message
- Useful for checking commit message standards (reference JIRA issue)
post-commit
- Runs after a commit
- Trigger local integration tests
post-checkout
- Runs after a checkout
- Useful for cleaning workspace (clean AS project)

Overview of commonly used server hooks:

pre-receive
- Runs when someone attempts to push commits to the repository
- Enforce any development policy (code quality/standard checks, commit message checks, etc)
- Called once per push
update
- Runs after pre-receive
- Called separately for each ref (branch) that was pushed
- Reject single ref’s in a push instead of the entire push
post-receive
- Runs after a successful push
- Useful for triggering continuous integration system (e.g., could automatically trigger the Jenkins build)
- Useful for notifications