Re: about git hooks

["brian m. carlson" <sandals@crustytoothpaste.net>]

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On 2020-10-17 at 14:24:10, Sri Harsha Akavaramu wrote:
> Hi git,

Hey,

> I just wanted to know something about git hooks.
> 
> we use GitHub enterprise and I'm the owner of the GitHub.
> I'm trying to understand that I want to pose the pre-commit and
> post-commit rules on all the developers by default and is there a way
> to pose git hook restrictions on all developers on default.
> 
> I came to know when reading with the documentation we cant push hooks
> to source control. Then what is the best preferred way to pose
> pre-commit things on all developers using the repository?

This is a great question, and it's kind of answered in our FAQ[0].  The
short answer is that you don't.

It's possible for any user to simply bypass pre-commit hooks with
--no-verify without being noticed, and there are a lot of good reasons
to do so.  For example, if I need to make a large set of changes, I may
make a large number of temporary commits, one each time I make a change
that works.  Those commits won't meet anybody's set of standards and
therefore won't pass the hook, and I'll need to clean them up later, but
that helps me organize my development process in a useful way.  The hook
here would just be an annoyance that gets in the way.

You may wish to provide hooks and an install script for the benefit of
the user who wants them, but anything that runs on a developer system
cannot be an effective control.

The right way to add checks that need to apply to all users is to use
either a pre-receive hook or a CI system, plus code review.  That lets
your tooling verify things like commit message formatting, code
formatting, tests, and other things you'll want to check before merge.
The code review, besides being a best practice for finding bugs and
problems before merge, also prevents developers from neutering the CI
system by disabling it from working properly.

That's the way that most organizations handle these problems, and
generally it works pretty well.

[0] https://git-scm.com/docs/gitfaq#Documentation/gitfaq.txt-HowdoIusehookstopreventusersfrommakingcertainchanges
-- 
brian m. carlson (he/him or they/them)
Houston, Texas, US

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