Common Types of Subversion Hooks

Question

What kinds of hook scripts are people using for Subversion? Just general ideas but code would be great too!

Answer 1

I have one setup using the Ruby Tinder library that I send to a campfire room, if anyone wants the script I can post or send the code to you.

Other common ones I've seen are posts to bug tracking systems and email notifications.

Answer 2

several things we use them for:

• integrating with the bug tracker (Trac in our case - a commit message that says 'Closes #514' automatically marks that bug as closed
• integrating with the build integration (buildbot in our case - a commit to a watched branch triggers a build
• pre-commit hook for validating the commit - we use svnchecker. It validates our Python code for PEP8 correctness
• sending checkin mails to a mailing list
• running indentation scripts

Answer 3

In my work place we've set up a post-commit hook that generates RSS feeds that are displayed in various dash boards and are used for code reviewers to know when it is time to review and for us to see that new employees are committing enough.

Answer 4

We use FogBugz for bug tracking, it provides subversion commit scripts that allow you to include a case number in your check in comments and then associates the bug with the check in that fixed it. It does require a WebSVN instance to be set up so that you have a web based viewer for your repository.

Answer 5

I'm using post-commit hooks (I think it's this one) to post a message to a forum on Basecamp for each commit. Two advantages:

1. As the lead developer, I get a roll-up of commits every morning (via the RSS feed from that basecamp forum) and can see what my team has been up to pretty quickly.

2. Our Trac/SVN install is behind our firewall, so this gives my higher-ups in other locations a window into what we're doing. They might not understand it, but to a manager a lot of activity looks like, well, a lot of activity ;)

I guess the end result of this is similar to what @Aviv is doing.

I'm looking into solutions for building the latest commit on a separate server for continuous integration, but I'm going to have to change the way we make changes to our database schema before that will work.

Answer 6

This was discussed on the subversion users mailing list a while ago. This post in particular has some useful ideas.