Re: some (fairly simple) questions about hooks
On Wed, May 30 2018, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
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> just want to clarify a few things about hooks to make sure i'm not
> missing anything when i write my own hooks tutorial.
>
> first, for any hook to be active, it *must* be marked as executable
> -- that much seems clear from the man page.
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> next, "core.hooksPath" aside, the hooks related to any repository
> are (by default) in $GIT_DIR/hooks and *only* in that directory. AIUI,
> there is no way to extend or enhance the per-repo hooks with, perhaps,
> a common subset of hooks in a common directory, is there? (i'm
> ignoring the possibility that one could populate $GIT_DIR/hooks with a
> few symlinks to share some common hooks among a number of repos --
> would that work? and is it something that is even considered good
> programming practice?)
Yes. There's git-native no way to have N number of the same type of hooks. core.hooksPath is all or nothing.
See https://public-inbox.org/git/877eqqnq22.fsf@evledraar.gmail.com/ for some musings of mine about potential future plans here & workarounds in place in the wild, e.g. GitLab's support for N number of server-side hooks.
You can also use e.g. the "pee" utility frome moreutils (https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/) to accomplish the same thing.
> next, AIUI, the use of "core.hooksPath" *completely* overrides any
> hooks in $GIT_DIR/hooks, yes? that is, that config setting does not
> support any sort of enhancement of existing hooks, it's all or
> nothing, correct?
> and sticking with core.hooksPath, one could set it either globally
> to affect all repos, or one could of course set it locally to take
> advantage of it just for *some* repos, but not all of them.
Yes, this is not special to core.hooksPath but (almost) all config variables (aside from stuff like per-remote config which can't be set globally).
> finally, if you run "git init" for an existing repo, as i read it,
> based on the templates content in effect, that will install new hooks
> in a repo but *only* hooks for which there is no existing equivalent
> -- it will *never* overwrite an existing hook by the same name.
Yes "git init" can re-initialize an existing repo, but will not clobber existing stuff (or shouldn't).
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> oh, and related to that last paragraph, running "git init" related
> to hooks should be unaffected by core.hooksPath, is that correct? so
> that even if "git init" installs some new hooks in an existing repo,
> those new hooks will have no effect if core.hooksPath is set to refer
> somewhere else, yes?
Yes "git init" will just inject the hooks into .git/hooks, because it doesn't care about hooks, it's just re-injecting stuff found in the template dir, and the "hooks" dir is just one of the things that happens to exist there.
> am i missing any important features of hooks in the above?
Robert P. J. Day