git-receive-pack - Receive what is pushed into it

git-receive-pack <directory>

Invoked by git-send-pack and updates the repository with the information fed from the remote end.

This command is usually not invoked directly by the end user. The UI for the protocol is on the git-send-pack side, and the program pair is meant to be used to push updates to remote repository. For pull operations, see git-fetch-pack and git-clone-pack.

The command allows for creation and fast forwarding of sha1 refs (heads/tags) on the remote end (strictly speaking, it is the local end receive-pack runs, but to the user who is sitting at the send-pack end, it is updating the remote. Confused?)

Before each ref is updated, if $GIT_DIR/hooks/update file exists and executable, it is called with three parameters:

$GIT_DIR/hooks/update refname sha1-old sha1-new

The refname parameter is relative to $GIT_DIR; e.g. for the master head this is "refs/heads/master". Two sha1 are the object names for the refname before and after the update. Note that the hook is called before the refname is updated, so either should match what is recorded in refname.

The hook should exit with non-zero status if it wants to disallow updating the named ref. Otherwise it should exit with zero.

Using this hook, it is easy to generate mails on updates to the local repository. This example script sends a mail with the commits pushed to the repository:

#!/bin/sh
# mail out commit update information.
if expr "$2" : '0*$' >/dev/null
then
        echo "Created a new ref, with the following commits:"
        git-rev-list --pretty "$2"
else
        echo "New commits:"
        git-rev-list --pretty "$3" "^$2"
fi |
mail -s "Changes to ref $1" commit-list@mydomain
exit 0

Another hook $GIT_DIR/hooks/post-update, if exists and executable, is called with the list of refs that have been updated. This can be used to implement repository wide cleanup task if needed. The exit code from this hook invocation is ignored; the only thing left for git-receive-pack to do at that point is to exit itself anyway. This hook can be used, for example, to run "git-update-server-info" if the repository is packed and is served via a dumb transport.

#!/bin/sh
exec git-update-server-info

There are other real-world examples of using update and post-update hooks found in the Documentation/howto directory.

<directory>

The repository to sync into.

git-send-pack(1)

Written by Linus Torvalds <torvalds@osdl.org>

Documentation by Junio C Hamano.

Part of the git(7) suite