Share your git hooks

At work, we are using git for one of our projects.  One of the problems we encountered is that people (including myself) regularly forget to put the branch name in their commit message.  Why is that a big deal?  Once merged back to master, you see a lot of comments that show no indication of what they were for (for example 'added .gitignore').  I'd like to simplify things so that no one has to remember.  No need to prevent the checkin - just fix the comment...

These steps will ignore the ACLs and which server, etc... just pseudo code it...

Step 1: Setup a repo to hold the new hooks

server:/srv $ git init --bare githooks.git

Step 2: Add a new hook

server:/usr/share/git-core/templates $ rm hooks
server:/usr/share/git-core/templates $ git clone /srv/githooks.git hooks
server:/usr/share/git-core/templates $ cd hooks
server:/usr/share/git-core/templates/hooks $ nano commit-msg

#!/bin/bash

branch_name=$(git symbolic-ref -q HEAD)
branch_name=${branch_name##refs/heads/}
branch_name=${branch_name:-HEAD}

OLD=`cat $1`
NEW="[$branch_name] $OLD"
echo "$NEW" > $1
exit 0

server:/usr/share/git-core/templates/hooks $ chmod a+x commit-msg
server:/usr/share/git-core/templates/hooks $ git add commit-msg
server:/usr/share/git-core/templates/hooks $ git commit -a -s -m "added commit-msg"
server:/usr/share/git-core/templates/hooks $ git push origin master

Step 3: User clones a new repo....

client:~/work $ git clone git://somerepo.git repo
client:~/work $ cd repo
client:~/work/repo $ echo "something" > test.txt
client:~/work/repo $ git add test.txt
client:~/work/repo $ git commit -a -s -m "added something"

Step 4: Checking that it worked...

client:~/work/repo $ git log

commit 07ed146319a2e45ea97b2ecaa4a1ea8d365b6b01
Author: Malachi de AElfweald <malachid@gmail.com>
Date:   Thu Aug 25 12:59:58 2011 -0700

    [master] added something
   
    Signed-off-by: Malachi de AElfweald <malachid@gmail.com>

Step 5: Updating the hook "server side"

server:/usr/share/git-core/templates/hooks $ nano commit-msg

#!/bin/bash

branch_name=$(git symbolic-ref -q HEAD)
branch_name=${branch_name##refs/heads/}
branch_name=${branch_name:-HEAD}

OLD=`cat $1`
NEW="$branch_name: $OLD"
echo "$NEW" > $1
exit 0

server:/usr/share/git-core/templates/hooks $ git commit -a -s -m "changed commit-msg"
server:/usr/share/git-core/templates/hooks $ git push

Step 5: Updating the hook "client side"

client:~/work/repo $ cd .git/hooks
client:~/work/repo/.git/hooks $ git pull

Step 6: Retest it...

client:~/work/repo $ echo "something else" > test.txt
client:~/work/repo $ git commit -a -s -m "changed something else"
client:~/work/repo $ git log

commit 7f381725dd2663728f11f08d08ed0c1d83608047
Author: Malachi de AElfweald <malachid@gmail.com>
Date:   Thu Aug 25 13:33:43 2011 -0700

    master: changed something else
   
    Signed-off-by: Malachi de AElfweald <malachid@gmail.com>