hooks

git hooks will fire at various times, depending on the name. You can find example hooks inside .git/hooks/ in any git project.

You might want a distinct number to represent this “build”, or commit (even though we don't really have binary builds in languages like php). We can use a post-commit hook to pull in a subset of the SHA-1 hash. In this example we use the first 6 characters of the SHA-1, writing out to a file named “BUILD”.

#!/bin/sh
#
# An example hook script that is called after a successful
# commit is made.
#
# To enable this hook, rename this file to "post-commit".
 
git log|head -n 1|cut -c 8-13 - > BUILD

You probably wouldn't want to do this all the time. An example where it is very handy is if you might be working on a project that is a walkthrough from a book or web site. Although you can commit your code, it may depend on the state of the database. A prime example would be a drupal project.

#!/bin/sh
 
# adds a compressed database dump to every commit
echo "creating compressed database dump..."
mysqldump -umysqluser -pmysqlpass databasename | gzip > filename.gz
git add filename.gz
exit $?

* http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/githooks.html