Useful git hooks

Git hooks are a useful way to add and customize git’s behavior at different lifecycle phases (pre-commit, pre-push, etc).

Here are few hooks I use in my own workflow as a backend Kotlin dev. I’ve organized them by lifecycle phase.

Pre-push

Prevent pushing to master. This adds a confirmation to your shell so you avoid shooting yourself in the foot if you didn’t mean to push to master.

Pre-commit

ktlint. This runs the ktlint linter before every commit, so your formatting is cleaner.

Sharing git hooks

The .git directory is not versionable, so hooks can’t be pushed from there. This is by design, since you wouldn’t want git to inadvertently run someone else’s script on your machine.

You can, however, add your own .githooks directory, put your versioned hooks there, and then use a Makefile to initialize them. Thanks to this post for that idea.

init:
  git config core.hooksPath .githooks

Another option is to add an alias to your global git config:

[alias]
	inithooks = config core.hooksPath .githooks

Global hook templates

Git has a feature that will copy files into your repo’s .git folder on init. To configure this, edit your global git config to point the templatedir to your template directory.

[init]
	templatedir = ~/.dotfiles/git/templates

In this directory, create a folder called “hooks”, and place your git hooks there. Whenever you clone or init a repo, they will be copied into the .git folder.