Writing a git post-receive hook to deal with a specific branch

Here's my current hook in a bare repo that lives in the company's server: git push origin master This hooks pushes to Assembla. What i need is to push only one branch (master, ideally) when someone pushes changes to that branch on our server, and ignore pushes to other branches. Is it possible to select the branch from a bare repo and push only that branch to Assembla?

A post-receive hook gets its arguments from stdin, in the form:

<oldrev> <newrev> <refname>

Since these arguments are coming from stdin, not from a command line argument, you need to use read instead of $1 $2 $3.

The post-receive hook can receive multiple branches at once (for example if someone does a git push --all), so we also need to wrap the read in a while loop.

A working snippet looks something like this:

#!/bin/bash while read oldrev newrev refname do branch=$(git rev-parse --symbolic --abbrev-ref $refname) if [ "master" = "$branch" ]; then # Do something fi done

The last parameter that a post-receive hook gets on stdin is what ref was changed, so we can use that to check if that value was "refs/heads/master." A bit of ruby similar to what I use in a post-receive hook:

STDIN.each do |line|
    (old_rev, new_rev, ref_name) = line.split
    if ref_name =~ /master/
         # do your push
    end
end

Note that it gets a line for each ref that was pushed, so if you pushed more than just master, it will still work.

Stefan's answer didn't work for me, but this did:

#!/bin/bash

echo "determining branch"

if ! [ -t 0 ]; then
  read -a ref
fi

IFS='/' read -ra REF <<< "${ref[2]}"
branch="${REF[2]}"

if [ "master" == "$branch" ]; then
  echo 'master was pushed'
fi

if [ "staging" == "$branch" ]; then
  echo 'staging was pushed'
fi

echo "done"

Neither of the solutions above worked for me. After much, much debugging, it turns out that using the 'read' command doesn't work -- instead, parsing command line arguments the usual way works fine.

Here is the exact post-update hook that I just successfully tested now on CentOS 6.3.

#!/bin/bash

echo "determining branch"

branch=`echo $1 | cut -d/ -f3`

if [ "master" == "$branch" ]; then
    echo "master branch selected"
fi

if [ "staging" == "$branch" ]; then
    echo "staging branch selected"
fi

exec git update-server-info

UPDATE: on an even stranger note, the pre-receive hook takes its input via stdin, therefore read with 'read' (wow, never thought I'd say that). The post-update hook still works with $1 for me.

The answer from @pauljz works fine for certain git hooks like pre-push, but pre-commit does not have access to those variables oldrev newrev refname

So I created this alternate version which works for pre-commit, or really and hook. This is a pre-commit hook that will run a husky script if we're NOT on the master branch.

#!/bin/bash
# git 'commit' does not have access to these variables: oldrev newrev refname
# So get the branch name off the head

branchPath=$(git symbolic-ref -q HEAD) # Something like refs/heads/myBranchName
branch=${branchPath##*/}      # Get text behind the last / of the branch path

echo "Head: $branchPath";
echo "Current Branch: $branch";

if [ "master" != "$branch" ]; then

   # If we're NOT on the Master branch, then Do something
   # Original Pre-push script from husky 0.14.3

   command_exists () {
     command -v "$1" >/dev/null 2>&1
   }

   has_hook_script () {
     [ -f package.json ] && cat package.json | grep -q "\"$1\"[[:space:]]*:"
   }

   cd "frontend" # change to your project directory, if .git is a level higher

   # Check if precommit script is defined, skip if not
   has_hook_script precommit || exit 0

   # Node standard installation
   export PATH="$PATH:/c/Program Files/nodejs"

   # Check that npm exists
   command_exists npm || {
     echo >&2 "husky > can't find npm in PATH, skipping precommit script in package.json"
     exit 0
   }

   # Export Git hook params
   export GIT_PARAMS="$*"

   # Run npm script
   echo "husky > npm run -s precommit (node `node -v`)"
   echo

   npm run -s precommit || {
     echo
     echo "husky > pre-commit hook failed (add --no-verify to bypass)"
     exit 1
   }
fi

I hope that helps someone. You can easily modify for your needs, anything in between the if and fi statements.

I had written a PHP script for myself to do this functionality.

https://github.com/fotuzlab/githubdump-php

Host this file on your server, preferably repo root and define the url in github webhooks. Change 'allcommits' on line 8 with your branch name and add your code/function at line 18.

e.g.

function githubdump($payload_object) {
    // Write your code here.
    exec('git push origin master');
}

Simple approach, in git hook write

read refname
echo $refname

Simple - more info on this great link hooking system