Like most development shops, we use Git for source code management and campfire for internal communications with our team. We have a lot of projects going on, so it is important for us all to be aware of what the other is working on and doing.

We’ve been using a post-commit hook which notifies our campfire room whenever someone commits their work locally. It spits out the message, who wrote the code, and a timestamp. Again, nothing unusual but rather common and a best practice.

One of the annoying things of doing this is having to repeat the steps, mostly cut/paste, for each project that we want to keep in our repository. This is pretty much any project and experiment that we might be working or tinkering with – we like to keep our experiments in a repository that we can glean from later.

In the spirit of being productive, efficient and destroying any nonsensically repetitive tasks, we wrote a little gem that will create our post-commit hooks for us and populate it with the necessary details (campfire subdomain, login, password, room) and place in the .git/hooks directory of our project and then make the file executable.

We aptly named it “githooks” and it has it’s own command line tool for getting the job done – albeit it is long: githooks project_name –login login –pass password –domain domain –room “Super Duper”

With that being fairly long for the sake of flexibility, you can create a bash script that will populate the login, password, domain and room for you, so you just need to pass in the project name, e.g. campfire_hook project_name

You can find the code, it’s open source, on github, githooks. There is a read me that goes over how to use githooks and how to create the bash script I spoke of. Currently, it only supports campfire – it is all we need – but if you need something else, feel free to fork it and submit patches.