til/git/skip-git-hooks-as-needed.md

Skip Git Hooks As Needed

Projects have Git hooks configured for all sorts of reasons. Most common are pre-commit hooks which verify certain aspects of the contents of a commit. A pre-commit hook could check that the tests all pass, that the changes don't include any debugging statements, and so forth. There are all kinds of hooks though, like pre-rebase and post-checkout.

These hooks can sometimes get in the way and we may need to skip or disable them on a one-off basis.

Several Git commands offer a --no-verify flag which can skip running the hook associated with that command.

• git commit --no-verify (skips pre-commit and commit-msg hooks)
• git push --no-verify (skips pre-push hook)
• git merge --no-verify (skips pre-merge-commit hook)
• git am --no-verify (skips applypatch-msg and pre-applypatch hooks)

If you look in the .git/hooks directory, there are several other hooks not covered by the above. So, what if I am doing an action like git checkout and I want to skip the post-checkout hook?

I can override the hooksPath config for that one command with the -c flag.

$ git -c core.hooksPath=/dev/null checkout ...

By setting it to /dev/null, it will find no hooks available, so none will be executed for this command.

See man git-config for more details on core.hooksPath.