Haken: Git Hooks Reworked

For those of us who like git hooks, but not managing them.

Installation

If you are a homebrew user on OS X, this is available on a 'tap':

brew tap drench/moregit
brew install git-haken
git haken install

You can also set it up manually:

git clone git://github.com/drench/git-haken.git ~/.git-haken
git config --global init.templatedir ~/.git-haken/templates

From then on, any git repositories you create or clone will use this exciting alternate template and the hooks it contains.

To upgrade a tree you've already checked out:

cd some/boring/old/repo
rm -rf .git/hooks
git init

Haken comes with a few hooks that I endorse and use:

To prevent you from committing trailing whitespace or merge conflict markers
To prevent you from committing text files without an ending newline
To restart pow on checkout, if this is a Rails project using pow
To handle local user.name and user.email configuration overrides (please read the hook source for a better description of what this does)
To insert a ticket number into your commit message template if your branch name looks like it contains a ticket number

These hooks live in 17 subdirectories, one for each hook type: post-checkout hooks live under hooks/post-checkout.d/, pre-commit hooks go in hooks/pre-commit.d/, etc.

To learn more about the various hook types and what events trigger them, the githooks man page and the section on hooks in the Git Book are good places to start.

Unlike standard git hooks, where you are limited to one script per hook type, you can have as many scripts as you like for each type. If you want to put 15 scripts under .git/hooks/pre-commit.d/, I'd say it's kind of excessive, but git-haken won't stop you.

To disable a hook, remove its execute bit, or just delete the file. For example, if you don't find the pow hook useful, turn it off:

chmod -x .git_template/hooks/post-checkout.d/500-restart-pow.sh

Add your own!

You are a git user and I expect you to fork.

Write a hook in whatever language you like. Most hooks I've seen are shell or Perl scripts, but you could use just about anything: Ruby, Python, Node.js, PHP, even a binary compiled from C if that's what you're into.

License

MIT-style