Setup pre-commit hook and check commit message

Git hooks are scripts that you can define to run automatically every time a particular event occurs in a Git repository. You can customise these scripts to trigger some actions at key points in the development life cycle.

This article is mainly about using git hooks to run quality check before adding a commit and check the commit message standards.

pre-commit to check coding convention:

Create a file to use as pre-commit hook, in this example, we setup the hook to run gradle checkStyle command.

mkdir git-hooks
touch git-hooks/pre-commit.sh

commit-msg.sh to check commit message standard

Create a file to use as commit-msg hook, in this example, we setup the hook to run check the commit message if it contains USxxxxx prefix using regex.

touch git-hooks/commit-msg.sh

Setup script to apply configuration to git repo

touch setup-pre-commit-hook.sh

Run setup command to apply hooks

sh ./setup-pre-commit-hook.sh

Check the config

After setting up all the hooks needed, we can perform a simple check by changing the code and try to commit

git commit -a -m “Invalid commit message”

You may see this error message:

Error message indicating commit message is invalid

Tadaaa!!!!!!!!!!!