Setup git pre-push hook

Motivation

I often forget to run tests before pushing my commits. This is a bad practice. Someone might use my broken code in a collaborative environment. I was looking for a way to automatically run tests before creating a commit or pushing commits.

The solution is Git Hooks: Customizing Git Hooks.

Git Hooks

Many hooks can be setup in a Git repository. For example, Git Hooks can run before creating a commit (pre-commit), after creating a commit (post-commit) and before pushing commits to a remote branch (pre-push). All of these are client-side hooks and client-side hooks are not shared across local repositories. The other type of hooks are server-side hooks that run after commits are pushed to a remote server and policy is imposed on all users of the repository.

I have setup pre-push in a Git repository to avoid forgetting to run tests before sending updates to the remote server.

Setup pre-push

The way to setup pre-push is as follows:

mkdir .githooks

# content of pre-push is in the code box below

touch .githooks/pre-push

# make sure pre-push is executable

chmod u+x .githooks/pre-push

# set location of git hooks in git config
git config core.hooksPath .githooks

# test if pre-push runs as expected with dry run
git push --dry-run origin master

Inside the  pre-push script, I wrote a path to tests and run it.

#!/bin/bash

path_to_test=<path_to_test>

. $path_to_test

That's it! I won't forget to run tests anymore before sending my updates to a remote server.

A more comprehensive usage of Git Hooks is available in the page Customizing Git Hooks, but pre-push is sufficient for my use case.