Similar to the cowboys of yesteryear, Hookboy is an essential tool for anyone looking to round up, wrangle, and transport (i.e. share) Git Hooks. Additionally, it makes using them a ton easier!
Why should you care? First and foremost, Git Hooks provide a way to automate your own workflows. Properly leveraging such automation provides other benefits, such as forcing yourself to get better at commit messages, linting your source code upon commit, etc. Unfortunately, git does not offer a great out-of-box experience for maintaining, installing, and sharing Hooks. Hookboy aims to provide this great experience!
Currently, Hookboy is a command line tool that allows users to "install" Git Hooks, either from a local file, or from some file hosted out on the internet.
Under normal circumstances, to "Install" a Hook, one would have to navigate to the .git/hooks subdirectory of a repository, and modify/overwrite files there. This quickly gets tiresome with many files and many repositories, as Git does not natively offer an easy way to transfer Hooks around. A quick search around the internet will show you that there are other tools available today that offer a similar benefit to Hookboy, and you should check them out! However, Hookboy shines because of its small footprint, the drive to support any and all tech stacks (i.e. not just Javascript, Python, etc), and its stance towards user friendliness (i.e. be user friendly).
- Reduce manual, repetitive tasks (of course).
- For example, do you run a linter one last time before committing your code to make sure everything is up to par? Why not use a
pre-commitHook that runs a linter before accepting a commit?
- For example, do you run a linter one last time before committing your code to make sure everything is up to par? Why not use a
- Force yourself to get better.
- Did you tell yourself you would write better commit messages, only to continue to say, "I'll amend them later?" Well, you can use a Hook that inspects commit messages, and rejects them if they are bad! (bad is whatever you define it to be, everyone has different standards)
- Shift left
- If you have validation that normally runs on the server/remote to check commits for bad stuffâ„¢ (e.g. bad formatting, spelling, breaking of tests, etc), you can run them locally so that you can find a bad commit before you push!
- Tip: if you think you want to block the pushing of commits to a remote, you should at least provide a helpful message as to why so the pusher can quickly fix their code.
- Honestly, this is just a rewording of the top two reasons... Having three bullet points are nice though.
- applypatch-msg
- commit-msg
- fsmonitor-watchman
- post-update
- pre-applypatch
- pre-commit
- pre-merge-commit
- pre-push
- pre-rebase
- pre-receive
- prepare-commit-msg
- update
- https://github.com/rycus86/githooks
- https://github.com/Autohook/Autohook
- https://github.com/sds/overcommit
- https://pre-commit.com/
- https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-hooks
- https://pythonhosted.org/jig/
- https://github.com/typicode/husky
- Icon: @odinolav