Don't commit that file!

I wrote a small git pre-commit hook to prevent committing certain files. There are more words to this, but if you’re impatient, you can skip right to the goods.

At work, we have some configuration files tracked in git that we modify locally to enable debugging options. We don’t want to ignore these files and have to manage them in a different system outside of git, but we also don’t want the debugging options checked in.

So we keep the files tracked in git, and modify them on our local systems, and try to remember not to check in those debugging options.

After the debugging changes ended up in a pull request of mine, I had an idea: since I’m a computer programmer, what if I could use my computer to save myself from myself? It was just crazy enough to work.

What I really wanted was for git to prevent me from committing changes to these files, physically if necessary. The answer: git hooks.

Git hooks are custom scripts that run inside your local repository when one of several actions is taken, like committing, and merging, and the like. They’re very powerful, since they can be any script that runs in a shell, but like most things in computer science, they still can’t throw a punch. That meant my script would need to throw an error instead to keep me from committing those debugging changes.

A few minutes later I had cobbled together a git pre-commit hook script that prevents any of the unwanted files from being changed. The pre commit hook runs, as the name heavily implies, before the commit happens, so if one of the no-no files is in the changeset, I get a nice big error when I run git commit.

Here’s what I came up with:

#!/bin/sh
#
# This script prevents specific file modifications from taking place.
# We want certain config files checked into git so that builds work on a clone,
# *and* we need to modify these files locally to enable debug options.
# This leads to a scenario where we can accidentally check in the config files
# with our local debug options checked in. This script prevents that.

# Get current revision to check against.
if git rev-parse --verify HEAD >/dev/null 2>&1
then
  against=HEAD
else
  # Initial commit: diff against an empty tree object
  against="$(git hash-object -t tree /dev/null)"
fi

# Redirect output to stderr.
exec 1>&2

# Test staged files against the files we don't want to check in,
# and abort if found.
git diff --cached --name-only "$against" | while read -r file;
do
  if test "$file" == "path/to/my/unchanagble/file.yml";
  then
    echo "Don't check in file.yml. Aborting!"
    exit 1
  fi

  if test "$file" == "some/other/file.php";
  then
    echo "Don't check in file.php. Aborting!"
    exit 1
  fi

  # Repeat pattern as necessary.
done

The magic sauce is near the end; I loop over the output of git diff --cached --name-only, which shows the name of each staged file, and check if the file name matches one of the files I don’t want to commit. If the file matches, exit with a non-zero status, and git will happily prevent me from making that commit. Hooray!

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