Support unversioned/local hooks

[harto]

I was wondering if there's a generalized way to run hooks that are specific to my development environment. For example, I'd like a post-checkout hook that calls ctags with a specific configuration, but many engineers on my team don't use ctags.

One thought I had was to implement a hook that could be configured to look for unversioned hooks in a specified directory. I.e. maybe something like:

PostCheckout:
  Local:
    path: ".unversioned-git-hooks"

Then if <repo>/.unversioned-git-hooks contained post-checkout, etc. they would be run after regular Overcommit hooks. And /.unversioned-git-hooks could be added to .gitignore.

[harto]

Actually, maybe the above makes more sense as a kind of global configuration setting. But anyway, that's one idea. :)

[harto]

I figured out a way to do this.

I added a bunch of hook definitions like this:

PostCheckout:
  Local:
    enabled: true
    required_executable: ".git-hooks/local/post-checkout"

PostCommit:
  Local:
    enabled: true
    required_executable: ".git-hooks/local/post-commit"

Then I check those files into version control. They look like e.g.:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
if [[ -f .local-git-hooks/post-checkout ]]; then
  exec .local-git-hooks/post-checkout $*
fi

Then, I can optionally create hooks in .local-git-hooks, which is added to .gitignore.

[sds]

Thanks for sharing, @harto. This is a great workaround.

On small point: careful with the use of $* in scripts. This returns all arguments passed to the script as a single string, but you want an array of arguments. Thus you should use $@.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
if [[ -f .local-git-hooks/post-checkout ]]; then
  exec .local-git-hooks/post-checkout "$@"
fi

Yes, the double quotes are important as well. Consider the following two scripts:

for arg in "$@"; do echo $arg; done

for arg in $@; do echo $arg; done

Running ./script one two three "arg with spaces" for each respectively:

"$@"

one
two
three
arg with spaces

$@

one
two
three
arg
with
spaces

Hope this helps!

[harto]

Oh, nice. Thanks for the bash tip! (I always forget how to quote things properly...)