gihoma

A simple and effective git hook manager.

Motivation

Git hooks are surprisingly useful to update dependencies not managed by git or to test your code before making a commit. The hooks themselves should be shareable through git. Whether or not a developer uses the hooks is up to them. Therefore, enforcing policies can not be done through git hooks. Git hooks should be viewed, in my opinion, as a tool able to prevent silly mistakes.

To this end I needed a tool that can install and uninstall git hooks as symbolic links.

Usage

Install and add gihoma to your development dependencies.

npm install --save-dev gihoma

Create a gihoma directory in your project root. This is where you'll place all your hooks.

mkdir gihoma

Add hooks, the file extension will be dropped. For example gihoma/pre-commit.js:

#!/usr/bin/env node

console.log('Hello World!')

Ensure the file is executable:

chmod +x `gihoma/pre-commit.js`

Have gihoma create symbolic links to all executable files in the gihoma directory:

node_modules/.bin/gihoma install --verbose

I recommend providing your developers with a setup npm script. For example package.json:

{
  "scripts": {
    "setup": "npm install && gihoma install --verbose"
  }
}

Documentation

The file structure documents the API. Files and variables starting with an _ are not part of the public API. Arguments are documented in the code. Examples are given in the tests. Even though this method of documentation is not easily searchable, the chance of incorrect information is minimized.

Future work

• Error on multiple files resolving to the same git hook name (pre-commit.a and pre-commit.b).
• Warn on unknown git hook names.
• Improve command line tool, make hooks path configurable.
• Installing or uninstalling a single specified hook.
• Keeping the symbolic links in sync with the actually available hooks after a checkout requires some more thought.
• Writing an asynchronous version.