Note: Autohook isn’t new at all—the first release was published on January 31st, 2017, and the most recent on August 26th, 2018. I just never wrote a proper introduction post about it, and given its popularity—92 stargazers, some users, and even 4 co-maintainers—it certainly feels warranted.
Way, way back in early 2017, I wanted to implement some Git hooks in a repository at SimpleLegal. Being my usual self, I decided to both overengineer the solution and not use any existing tooling, because that would be entirely too sensible.
So I wrote a relatively simple tool to automagically run Git hooks that can be added to
the repo itself.
It’s basically a simple shell script that replaces the various hook files in
.git/hooks/ and then looks for scripts to run in appropriately named directories in
hooks/.
An example tree is probably clearer than my description:
my_project/
├── .git/
│ ├── post-checkout # symlink to hooks/autohook.sh
│ ├── pre-commit # symlink to hooks/autohook.sh
│ └── ... # other symlinks to hooks/autohook.sh
├── hooks/
│ ├── autohook.sh
│ ├── post-checkout/
│ │ └── 01-delete-pyc-files # symlink to hooks/scripts/delete-pyc-files.sh
│ ├── pre-commit/
│ │ ├── 01-delete-pyc-files # symlink to hooks/scripts/delete-pyc-files.sh
│ │ └── 02-run-tests # symlink to hooks/scripts/run-tests.sh
│ └── scripts/
│ ├── delete-pyc-files.sh
│ └── run-tests.sh
└── ...
Why did I do it this way? Well, I wanted to be able to enforce the running of said scripts across the team. Furthermore, I didn’t really give other existing solutions (e.g., pre-commit) an honest look, likely because I wanted to do it myself. That said, I vaguely remember not quickly finding anything that didn’t have to be installed on a POSIX system, and Autohook was always intended to be just a portable shell script with no dependencies other than a compatible shell.
Anyway, now it’s gaining a bit of a life of its own. I haven’t used it in years, but others still seem to, so I’ve moved it to a GitHub organization. It’ll likely get more love than it has from me in quite a while.
And now you know about it too! :)
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