Welcome to the Puppet and Git, class 205: Git Hooks. Since we finished up talking about workflows, let’s move on and explore what a git hook is and how you can use one to improve your workflow.

Git Hooks

What is a git hook? You can read some boring official documentation, but who does that? Instead here’s a short summary: A git hook is a program that is called when a git events are triggered. These programs are usually simple shell scripts and some common events people use them with are commits. We’ll look at commits and the event that fires before the commit is completed.

Pre-Commit Hook

If you’ve been programming for more than, say, an hour, you’ve undoubtedly experienced the bad mojo that results from missing a semi-colon or curly brace or other piece of syntactical junk. And you may have even committed such a piece of broken code and pushed it upstream just to watch the whole thing fall apart. If we can lint our code, we can determine whether the code meets the syntactic requirements of a language. It’s important to note that linting doesn’t verify that your code does what it says it will do, it JUST verifies that the code will parse or compile. This would prevent the wonderful pattern of commits that looks something like:
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