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It is exhausting to edit files again and again to have a consistent style.This project provides a Git pre-receive hook to validate pushed commits onthe Git server side. The hook avoids all issues by rejecting any commitnot matching the rules to get in to the repository in the first place.

The pre-receive hook runs some checks on commits on its own, and searchesfor programming language specific syntax checkers on the PATH of the serverto check changed files with them. The process is pretty fast, because onlythe added and modified files on the pushed commits are passed to the syntaxcheckers, also in parallel. It wouldn't slow you down unless your commitsare touching hundreds of files.

It is possible to install the tool with pip:

pip install igcommit

Link thescript tohooks/pre-receive on you Gitrepositories on your Git server:

ln -s igcommit-receive /home/git/repositories/myproject.git/hooks/pre-receive

• Validate received commits one by one not just the last one
• Only validate added or modified files on the commits
• Report all problems before failing
• Check for duplicate commit summaries
• Check for misleading merge commits
• Validate committer and author timestamps
• Validate committer and author names and email addresses
• Check commit message best practices (80 lines, first line summary...)
• Check commit summary formatting
• Validate commit tags against a list[BUGFIX],[FEATURE],[WIP]...
• Check for changed file paths
• Accept commits tagged as[HOTFIX],[MESS],[TEMP], or[WIP]with issues
• Check executable bits and shebangs
• Check for allowed branch names
• Check symlinks
• Check CSS files withcsslint
• Check Go files withgolint
• Check HTML files withhtmlhint
• Check Puppet files withpuppet parser validate andpuppet-lint
• Check Python files withflake8 orpycodestyle andpyflakes
• Check Ruby files withrubocop
• Check shell scripts withshellcheck
• Check JavaScript files witheslint,jshint,jscs, orstandard
• Check CoffeeScript files withcoffeelint
• Check PHP files withphpcs
• Run the external check commands in parallel
• Validate JSON, XML, YAML file formats

Here is an example problem output:

=== CheckDuplicateCommitSummaries on CommitList ===ERROR: summary "Add nagios check for early expiration of licenses" duplicated 2 times=== CheckCommitSummary on 31d0f6b ===WARNING: summary longer than 72 characters=== CheckCommitSummary on 6bded65 ===WARNING: past tense used on summary=== CheckCommand "flake8" on src/check_multiple.py at 6bded65 ===INFO: line 10 col 5: E225 missing whitespace around operatorINFO: line 17 col 80: E501 line too long (122 > 79 characters)INFO: line 17 col 85: E203 whitespace before ','=== CheckCommitMessage on 6fdbc00 ===WARNING: line 7 is longer than 80WARNING: line 9 is longer than 80

The script itself is currently configuration free. Though, some of the syntaxcheckers called by the script uses or requires configurations. Thoseconfiguration files has to be on the top level of the Git repository.

Continuous Integration Server

A continuous integration server can run such checks with the many otherthings it is doing. Moving this job from it has many benefits:

• Synchronous feedback
• More efficient
• Disallow any commit violating the rules

Pre-commit Hook

Even though, pre-receive hook gives later feedback than pre-commit hook,it has many advantages over it:

• No client side configuration
• Plugins has to be installed only once to the Git server
• Everybody gets the same checks
• Enforcement, nobody can skip the checks
• Commit checking (pre-commit hook only gets what is changed in the commit)

IDE Integration

The same advantages compared to pre-commit hooks applies to IDEintegration. Though, IDE integration gives much sooner and nicer feedback,so it is still a good idea, even with the pre-receive hook.

The script has no dependencies on Python 3.4 or above. The script executesthe validation commands using the shell. The necessary ones for checkedrepositories need to be installed separately. See the complete list ofcommands on theconfig.py. The commands which are notavailable on thePATH is not going to be used.

I found it useful to check what the script would have complained if it hadbeen active on different Git repositories. You can run a command like thisto test this inside a Git repository against last 50 commits:

git log --reverse --oneline HEAD~50..HEAD |    sed 's:\([^ ]*\) .*:\1 \1 refs/heads/master:' |    python ../igcommit/igcommit-receive

Version 2.0

• Fix line numbers on syntax errors for executables being 1 off
• Recognize and validate symlinks
• Validate committer and author timestamps
• Validate contributor names and email addresses
• Reduce commit message line length limits
• Complain about file extensions on executables

Version 2.1

• Add [TEMP] to recognized commit tags
• Fix getting the changes of the initial commit (Zheng Wei)
• Fix various file descriptor leaks
• Check commit summaries more strictly
• Check shebangs of non-executable files too
• Don't check on empty file contents
• Improve unicode support on Python 2
• Fix checking symlink targets

Version 2.2

• Fixeslint configuration (Jerevia)
• Accepts commits with[TEMP] with issues
• Stop skipping empty files
• Make sure not to get unknown file contents
• Move file extensions to config
• Increase timestamp comparison tolerance for 1 more minute
• Handle spaces on shebangs

Version 2.3

• Handle check command failing immediately
• Support pushed tags
• Fix failing on file check with bogus return code
• Include list of commit tags on warning
• Fix recognising commit tags[REVIEW] and[SECURITY]

Version 2.4

• Fix recognising removed configuration files
• Support coffeelint

Version 2.5

• Fix unicode issue on Python 2 for XML, YAML, and JSON (jcoetsie)

Version 3.0

• Drop Python 2 support
• Fix handling filenames with spaces (Friz-zy)

Version 3.1

• Stop complaining about the same commit for Git tags
• Fix checking contributor names and email addresses
• Stop complaining about file extensions we don't know about
• Filter out checking format of files undertemplates/ directories
• Improve code quality and style

Version 3.2

• Reduce severity of length for merge commit summary to warning

Version 3.3

• Add optional branch name check via regular expressions

The script is released under the MIT License. The MIT License is registeredwith and approved by the Open Source Initiative[1].