Share common / useful SVN pre-commit hooks

Question

What are some common and/or useful pre-commit hooks for SVN?

Answer 1

That a user has actually entered a comment on the commit message, and that it contains a particular issue number to track.

Answer 2

I do a word count on submit messages. They need to be 5 words or more. This has led to some comedic insults against me...

Answer 3

• Check for tabs and reject the check-in.
• Check for inconsistent line endings and reject the check-in.
• Check for occurance of "CR: [username]" and reject the check-in if there is no code review.

Answer 4

I like using svn hooks to:

• enforce the stricter points of code style
• check for obvious syntax errors
• make sure special Trac keywords like "Fixes" or "Addresses" are actually preceding the appropriate issue number

Answer 5

Checking for absolute paths in various text files (i.e. VRML, XML etc). Most of the checked-in code should never have absolute paths, yet some people and tools insist on producing hard-coded stuff.

Answer 6

Insert a note into Mantis bugtracker with the changelist details based on the commit message having 'issue #' or the like via RegEx.

Answer 7

I check the filetype and make sure that certain banned types are not committed by accident (eg .obj, .pdb). Well, not since the first time someone checked in 2 gig of compiler-generated temporary files :(

for windows:

---

@echo off

svnlook log -t "%2" "%1" | c:\tools\grep -c "[a-zA-z0-9]" > nul
if %ERRORLEVEL% NEQ 1 goto DISALLOWED

echo Please enter a check-in comment 1>&2
exit 1


:DISALLOWED
svnlook changed -t %2 %1 > c:\temp\pre-commit.txt

findstr /G:"%1\hooks\ignore-matches.txt"  c:\temp\pre-commit.txt > c:\temp\precommit-bad.txt
if %ERRORLEVEL% NEQ 0 exit /b 0

echo disallowed file extension >> c:\temp\precommit-bad.txt
type c:\temp\precommit-bad.txt 1>&2
exit 1

Answer 8

I use a post-commit hook to rewrite the author property to a friendly name from our ldap tree. (authentication is with employee id)

Answer 9

A great commit hook we have at on our archive is to check all .VCPROJ (or .CSPROJ) visual studio projects to make sure the output directories weren't changed to anything local (commonly used for debugging).

These problems will compile properly but still break the build because of missing executables.

Answer 10

How about a hook to compile the project? e.g. Run make all. This ensures no one checks in code that doesn't compile! :)

Answer 11

Some prefer running a lint-like tool for a given language to find common problems in the code and/or enforce coding style. However in a small and skilled team I prefer to allow every commit to go through and deal with possible problems during continuous integration and/or code review. Thanks to this commits are faster which encourages more frequent commits, leading to easier integration.

Answer 12

Solving lack of File Externals in SVN 1.5 using PostUpdate and PreCommit

Answer 13

In the company I currently work on, this is checked:

• If binary files have the needs lock attribute set;
• If the Java files have the standard copyright notice and if it includes the current year;
• If the code is properly formatted (we use Jalopy for code formatting) - this may sound silly but it actually makes text comparisons between different versions easier;
• If the code has a commit message;
• If the directory structure conforms to what is defined (all projects should be under a defined SVN folder, and each project should have a tags, branch and trunk folder);

I guess that's it.

I like the idea of checking if the commit is associated with a ticket; it actually makes a lot of sense to me.

Answer 14

That it has a commit message, and it is != than "bug fixing". Damn, did I hate those useless messages!

Answer 15

I use the check-mime-type.pl pre-commit hook to check that MIME Type and End of line options are set on committed files. I use subversion to publish files to be visible on a website using DAV, and all files without the MIME Type set get served as text files (e.g. HTML source gets displayed in a browser instead of the rendered markup).

Answer 16

We use a pre-commit and post-commit hook combo to automatically update bugzilla with the associated entry from the svn commit.

We use a second (pre-commit) hook to ensure that the appropriate svn:eol-style and svn:keywords properties are set on a file before it is added to the repostitory.

We have a third (post-commit) hook to kick off a build and mail the results if the build is broken, and to inform everyone when the build has been fixed again.

We have a fourth (post-commit) hook to kick off svn replication, to ensure that the offsite replication is as up to date as possible.

Unfortunately, I cannot post the source to these, but, except for the Bugzilla integration, they are easy enough to implement, and Hudson is probably a better choice for continuous integration.

For bugzilla integration, I would suggest looking at scmbug.

Answer 17

We have a post commit hook that posts the message to a twitter account. Uses twitsvn (disclaimer: I'm a committer on that project).

Silly? Maybe...but it turned out to be a good way for us to communicate the goings-on of our repository to some of our version-control-challenged team members. Once SVN started talking to them via their twitter client, it didn't feel so much like a black box.

Answer 18

I'd enjoy a hook that checks for [Reviewer: xyz] note in the commit message, and rejects the commit.

Answer 19

I'm thinking about writing one to check doctype's on aspx / html files, just to make sure everyone is using the correct one.

Also, you can have a pre (or post) commit hook push a notification out to your CI server as described on the Hudson Blog

Answer 20

You might want to take a look at: https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/subversion/branches/scons-build-system/www/tools_contrib.html#hook_scripts