How can I automate copy operations before Git commits?

Question

Context: I want to create a Jekyll collaborative blog. I created a subtree to insulate the collaborative portion of it from the rest of the site. However, as those goes into _posts, any blobs there are ignored when Jekyll renders the site.

Now, what I do is to copy everything from a specific folder (_posts/assets/) to assets/, so Jekyll can use those files after rendering the site.

I'm using Gitlab to host Jekyll, so I need to have this before pushing to Gitlab, so I do manually this now by do

cp -R _posts/assets/* assets
git add -A
git commit "New files for articles"

Can I put this on pre-commit hook so I can automate this process? Any tips?

Answer 1

Take a look at the git hooks available to you:

$ cd ~/project_name
$ ls -1 .git/hooks/
applypatch-msg.sample
commit-msg.sample
fsmonitor-watchman.sample
post-update.sample
pre-applypatch.sample
pre-commit.sample
pre-merge-commit.sample
prepare-commit-msg.sample
pre-push.sample
pre-rebase.sample
pre-receive.sample
update.sample

You're saying you want to execute a script pre-push (before pushing to GitLab). So, create a pre-push git hook script, and make it executable.

$ touch .git/hooks/pre-push
$ chmod +x .git/hooks/pre-push

Then, put your commands in that file.

.git/hooks/pre-push:

#!/bin/sh

cp -R _posts/assets/* assets
git add -A
git commit "New files for articles"
exit 0