Subversion: Pre-commitment issues

I’ve been doing a bit of Subversion hackery recently, and thought I’d briefly cover some of the major moving parts here for future reference.

First things first - Subversion hooks go into the /hooks directory of your repository and are executed by Subversion at various stages of the Subversion process. I’m working on a pre-commit hook, which will be executed by Subversion before each check-in is committed to the repository. Any non-zero return code from the hook will cause Subversion to deny the check-in.

If your Subversion repository is hosted on Unix, all you need to do is to name your pre-commit script “pre-commit” (note no extension), and make sure it is executable and has the appropriate hashbang at the top.

If your repository is hosted on Windows (like my test-repo is), you’ll need to create a pre-commit.bat file and call through to your script, like this -

@rem PRE-COMMIT.BAT
@rem
@rem Pre-commit script for Subversion running on Windows.
@rem Calls a pre-commit python script in the current folder.

pre-commit.py %* 

(I’m obviously relying on the .py extension being correctly associated with the Python interpreter here, but you could also invoke the interpreter directly if you wanted to.)

Now you have the basics in place, every check-in to the repo will cause the pre-commit.bat to be executed. However, this leaves you with a problem when it comes to debugging - the only way to execute your script is by attempting to make a commit to the repo and wait for Subversion to call the script.

Enter this cunning little trick from Thomas Guest - executing your hook script from the command-line with a past revision:

#!/usr/local/bin/python

"""
Pre-commit code goes here. Non-zero return code indicates
failure.
"""
def preCommit( repo, transaction, useRevision=False ):
        # put your pre-commit code here
       
        return 0

"""
Main control logic. Parses the command-line and invokes the
preCommit() method with the appropriate parameters.
"""
def main():
        usage = """usage: %prog [options] REPO TXN

Run pre-commit checks on a repository transaction.

For debugging, try "%prog -r /path/to/repo 123" to check revision 123
"""
        from optparse import OptionParser
        parser = OptionParser(usage=usage)
        parser.add_option(
                "-r", "--revision",
                help="Test mode. TXN actually refers to a revision.",
                action="store_true", default=False)

        try:
                (opts, (repo, transaction)) = parser.parse_args()
        except:
                parser.print_help()
                return 1

        return preCommit( repo, transaction, opts.revision )

if __name__ == "__main__":
        import sys
        sys.exit(main())

When Subversion invokes the hook, it will call it with the repository-location as the first parameter, and a transaction id as the second. By allowing the command-line to treat the 2nd parameter as a revision instead, it allows us to test and debug the hook without going through Subversion all the time:

pre-commit.py -r /path/to/repo 123

Thanks to Thomas for the idea, and apologies for reimplementing it badly.