Re: post-checkout hook not run on clone

From: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
Date: Mar 3, 2009, 04:28 UTC
Message-ID: <20090303042848.GC18136@coredump.intra.peff.net>
In-Reply-To: <20273.1236033817@relay.known.net>

On Mon, Mar 02, 2009 at 02:43:37PM -0800, layer wrote:

> I realize this might be a feature, but when I switch to the master
> branch with "git checkout master" it is, and I would think that a
> clone that gets the master branch would also does a sort of "checkout
> master" and would run the hook.

Right. Hooks are not cloned with the repo.

> In any case, I'd be happy of there was a post-clone hook, instead, but
> there isn't.

The general wisdom on the list is that it's a bad idea to run remote code arbitrarily for security reasons (i.e., "git clone git://host/foo.git" should not automatically run code from "host"). Even if you are going to build and run the contents of "foo.git", you at least have a chance to inspect the changes via git.

However, for situations where you are OK implicitly trusting the remote, it is obviously less convenient.

> Any suggestions?

Most suggestions I have seen involve shipping the hooks in your repo, and then having users copy them to their .git/hooks directory (and you can even provide a script for that).

Unfortunately, there is a chicken-and-egg problem there with the initial checkout. You could do something like (assuming the hooks are in "hooks" in the repo) to bootstrap:

  git clone -n <repo.git>
  cd repo
  git archive --format tar HEAD hooks | tar -C .git/hooks -xf -
  git checkout master

-Peff