TLDR: Git hooks are an awesome way to automatically verify your code as you commit your changes
I’m sure we’ve all been there where we accidentally committed a change that we were supposed to undo or wasn’t ready to be pushed and don’t realize it until the build breaks or QA finds a bug.
The first step I take to avoid committing anything unintentionally is instead of just running git add -A I make sure to review all the changes in the files I’m potentially committing. This is where a graphical tool like Gitk or SmartGit comes in handy as they allow you to click on your modified files and easily view a diff and then select which changes to stage.
Unfortunately changes still slip through as happened to me yesterday when a change of mine got pushed all the way to Test before it was noticed. This led me to create an additional safety net.
Enter Git hooks
Client side Git hooks are simply scripts that reside in you local repo in the .git/hooks directory. These scripts get run at specific times during your local workflow depending on the name of the hook. So for me I wrote a pre-commit hook that checks all the files that are about to be committed and looks for the string 'todo: remove'
# Redirect output to stderr.
exec 1>&2
FORBIDDEN='todo: remove'
git diff --cached --name-only | \
xargs grep --with-filename -i -n "$FORBIDDEN" && echo "COMMIT REJECTED Found '$FORBIDDEN' references. Please remove them before commiting" && exit 1
exit
So now if I make any change that I want to undo before committing, say like commenting out a conditional to make testing easier, I just add a comment like //todo: remove and git won’t let me commit the changes.
You could also have it look for common debug statements like console.log in javascript files or even have it run a code analysis tool against the files staged for commit.
You can download the above hook from this gist: https://gist.github.com/bpugh/6a9617ac277c93bc86fe5f1507f5ec90