Raincoat

http://github.com/rhburrows/raincoat

Intro

Git hooks are scripts that git runs before and after it call some commands. They can be specified by placing executable files in the .git/hooks directory and naming them according to a certain convention. However, the .git/hooks directory is not distributed with the git repository, so any hooks that you install must be reinstalled every time you or anyone else clones the project.

Installation

Raincoat can be installed through rubygems.

gem install raincoat

If you wish to run the tests, or build the documentation you will also need to install rspec, cucumber, and yard

Usage

The first step is to initialize the raincoat hooks in your project. This can be done by running the following command from the root directory of your project.

raincoat install

Make sure to back up any existing git hooks you have first as raincoat will be writing its own hooks at this point.

Raincoat works by looking in your script directory for the directory with the same name as the hook being executed, and then it runs each command in there. For example, the when the pre-commit hook is executed it will look in <script_dir>/pre-commit and run each script in there.

By default the script directory is set to script but a different script directory can be specified by defining it in the configuration file (see below).

Anatomy of a Raincoat Script

Raincoat expects each of the scripts within the various hook directories to follow two conventions.

1. Define a class with a name corresponding to the file name i.e. email_changes.rb should contain a class called EmailChanges
2. The defined call should respond to the call method with one parameter

The parameter that is passed to the call method is a string representation of the change that is being made in git. For example in the case of pre-commit it is the difference between the files that are currently staged and the HEAD commit.

If the call method returns false then the operation will be unsuccessful and git will not proceed. If it returns true the hook will have a 0 exit status so git can continue.

Configuring Raincoat

Raincoat is configured through a YAML file. By default raincoat checks the root directory of the project for raincoat.yml, but a different configuration file can be specified when installing raincoat into the project by passing it to the install command

raincoat install my-config.yml

Will install raincoat to read the my-config.yml configuration file.

Raincoat can understand the following values in the configuration file.

• script_dir: the base directory for raincoat scripts. The actual scripts will be in something like <script_dir>/precommit