Tip: Share a Git Hooks Directory Across Your Repositories

TL;DR

git config --global core.hookspath '<path to hooks directory>'

Sharing Hooks Across Repos

I posted before about using a pre-commit hook to check that I’m not committing anything that I really shouldn’t be (anything I’ve tagged with //DONOTCOMMIT).

Hooks are specified in the .git/hooks directory. That’s great, a git repository is completely contained within its parent folder, you can copy it somewhere else and all of the code, history and config come with it.

It’s not so convenient if you want to create some hooks that apply across multiple repositories though. You can just copy your hook files between all of your repos, or it turns out that there is a smarter way. Git config has a core.hookspath key. You can create a folder somewhere with the hooks that you want to apply to all repos and set this key.

Use git config --global to set the value of a key in the global config file and git config --global --list to list the config keys and their current values.

git config --global core.hookspath '<path to hooks directory>'