GitHooks with PowerShell on Windows to automate source control operations

Jun 3, 2017 |

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There are a whole host of things one tends to check before committing code into the source control system. It’s a proven fact that addressing technical issues in the product are less expensive the earlier they are identified. Git luckily gives you a bunch of events against your local repository that you can leverage to automate the pre commit checks in your codebase. The average windows user may find it difficult to script the actions using shell script. Luckily you can invoke PowerShell scripts on Windows for your GitHooks. In this blogpost we’ll cover an end to end example…

Where are the GitHooks scripts?

Git ships with a number of sample hook scripts, in case you didn’t realise, these have always been here in your repository. Check out the .git folder in your repository… repo\.git\hooks. These samples are disabled by default. For instance, if you open that folder you’ll find a file called pre-commit.sample. To enable it, just rename it to pre-commit by removing the .sample extension and make the script executable. When you attempt to commit using git commit, the script is found and executed. If your pre-commit script exits with a 0 (zero), you commit successfully, otherwise the commit fails.

Even this script will fail on Windows as it won’t find the correct path to Shell executable.

Now if you are on windows, simply renaming the file won’t work. Git will fail to find shell in the designated path as specified in the script. The problem was lurking in the first line of the script, the shebang declaration:

#!/bin/sh

On Unix-like OS’s, the #! tells the program loader that this is a script to be interpreted, and /bin/sh is the path to the interpreter you want to use, sh in this case. Windows is definitely not a Unix-like OS. Git for Windows supports Bash commands and shell scripts via Cygwin. By default, what does it find when it looks for sh.exe at /bin/sh? Yup, nothing; nothing at all. Fix it by providing the path to the sh executable on your system. I’m using the 64-bit version of Git for Windows, so my shebang line looks like this.

#!C:/Program\ Files/Git/usr/bin/sh.exe

#!/bin/sh
#
# An example hook script to verify what is about to be committed.
# Called by "git commit" with no arguments.  The hook should
# exit with non-zero status after issuing an appropriate message if
# it wants to stop the commit.
#
# To enable this hook, rename this file to "pre-commit".

if git rev-parse --verify HEAD >/dev/null 2>&1
then
	against=HEAD
else
	# Initial commit: diff against an empty tree object
	against=4b825dc642cb6eb9a060e54bf8d69288fbee4904
fi

# If you want to allow non-ASCII filenames set this variable to true.
allownonascii=$(git config --bool hooks.allownonascii)

# Redirect output to stderr.
exec 1>&2

# Cross platform projects tend to avoid non-ASCII filenames; prevent
# them from being added to the repository. We exploit the fact that the
# printable range starts at the space character and ends with tilde.
if [ "$allownonascii" != "true" ] &&
	# Note that the use of brackets around a tr range is ok here, (it's
	# even required, for portability to Solaris 10's /usr/bin/tr), since
	# the square bracket bytes happen to fall in the designated range.
	test $(git diff --cached --name-only --diff-filter=A -z $against |
	  LC_ALL=C tr -d '[ -~]\0' | wc -c) != 0
then
	cat <<\EOF
Error: Attempt to add a non-ASCII file name.

This can cause problems if you want to work with people on other platforms.

To be portable it is advisable to rename the file.

If you know what you are doing you can disable this check using:

  git config hooks.allownonascii true
EOF
	exit 1
fi

# If there are whitespace errors, print the offending file names and fail.
exec git diff-index --check --cached $against --

This is what the pre-commit script looks like, an average windows user may struggle with a shell script, luckily PowerShell scripts can be used as a substitute…

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Invoke PowerShell script in GitHook

Let’s start off simply by removing everything in the pre-commit GitHook shell script and see how you can invoke a PowerShell script with GitHook in Git on a Windows machine. As you can see in the example below, we are simply just calling a PowerShell script from a shell script through a GitHook script. Of course, you need to give the path to the PowerShell script, it’s best to reference this path from the root of the repository.

#!C:/Program\ Files/Git/usr/bin/sh.exe
echo
exec powershell.exe -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File ".\.git\hooks\AutoFix-VisualStudioFiles.ps1"
exit

Automate Formatting Config files in a Git Repository using PowerShell GitHook

Alright with the basics of the plumbing out of the way, let’s look at the example of doing something meaningful with this Pre-Commit GitHook. In this example the script scans the solution folder (the parent of the .git folder) for all app.config, web.config and *.csproj files and auto-formats them to minimize the possibility of getting merge conflicts based on the ordering of elements within these files.

Most of the merge conflicts arise from reshuffled configuration files and project files, these are the most tricky conflicts to resolve.

Here is what the script exactly does on each file type,

app.config & web.config files - sorts appSettings elements by key, in alphabetic order, sorts assemblyBinding.dependentAssembly elements alphabetically based on the assemblyIdentity.name attribute
.csproj files - sorts appSettings elements by key, in alphabetic order, sorts Reference, ProjectReference & Compile elements

Did you know you can now use Pester to test your PowerShell script, see this example here on how to put Pester in action to unit test your PowerShell scripts and visualize the test results Testing PowerShell with Pester and Visual Studio Team Services

Function AutoFix-WebConfig([string] $rootDirectory)
{
    $files = Get-ChildItem -Path $rootDirectory -Filter web.config -Recurse

    return Scan-ConfigFiles($files)
}

Function AutoFix-AppConfig([string] $rootDirectory)
{
    $files = Get-ChildItem -Path $rootDirectory -Filter app.config -Recurse

    return Scan-ConfigFiles($files)
}

Function Scan-ConfigFiles([System.IO.FileInfo[]] $files)
{
    $modifiedfiles = @()

    foreach($file in $files)
    {
        $original = [xml] (Get-Content $file.FullName)
        $workingCopy = $original.Clone()

        if ($workingCopy.configuration.appSettings -ne $null){
            $sorted = $workingCopy.configuration.appSettings.add | sort { [string]$_.key }
            $lastChild = $sorted[-1]
            $sorted[0..($sorted.Length-2)] | foreach {$workingCopy.configuration.appSettings.InsertBefore($_, $lastChild)} | Out-Null
        }

        if ($workingCopy.configuration.runtime.assemblyBinding -ne $null){
            $sorted = $workingCopy.configuration.runtime.assemblyBinding.dependentAssembly | sort { [string]$_.assemblyIdentity.name }
            $lastChild = $sorted[-1]
            $sorted[0..($sorted.Length-2)] | foreach {$workingCopy.configuration.runtime.assemblyBinding.InsertBefore($_,$lastChild)} | Out-Null
        }

        $differencesCount = (Compare-Object -ReferenceObject (Select-Xml -Xml $original -XPath "//*") -DifferenceObject (Select-Xml -Xml $workingCopy -XPath "//*")).Length

        if ($differencesCount -ne 0)
        {
            $workingCopy.Save($file.FullName) | Out-Null
            $modifiedfiles += $file.FullName
        }
    }

    return $modifiedfiles
}

Function AutoFix-CsProj([string] $rootDirectory)
{
    $files = Get-ChildItem -Path $rootDirectory -Filter *.csproj -Recurse
    $modifiedfiles = @()

    foreach($file in $files)
    {
        $original = [xml] (Get-Content $file.FullName)
        $workingCopy = $original.Clone()

        foreach($itemGroup in $workingCopy.Project.ItemGroup){

            # Sort the reference elements
            if ($itemGroup.Reference -ne $null){

                $sorted = $itemGroup.Reference | sort { [string]$_.Include }

                $itemGroup.RemoveAll() | Out-Null
 
                foreach($item in $sorted){
                    $itemGroup.AppendChild($item) | Out-Null
                }
            }

            # Sort the compile elements
            if ($itemGroup.Compile -ne $null){

                $sorted = $itemGroup.Compile | sort { [string]$_.Include }

                $itemGroup.RemoveAll() | Out-Null
 
                foreach($item in $sorted){
                    $itemGroup.AppendChild($item) | Out-Null
                }
            }

            # Sort the project references elements
            if ($itemGroup.ProjectReference -ne $null){

                $sorted = $itemGroup.ProjectReference | sort { [string]$_.Include }

                $itemGroup.RemoveAll() | Out-Null
 
                foreach($item in $sorted){
                    $itemGroup.AppendChild($item) | Out-Null
                }
            }
        }

        $differencesCount = (Compare-Object -ReferenceObject (Select-Xml -Xml $original -XPath "//*") -DifferenceObject (Select-Xml -Xml $workingCopy -XPath "//*")).Length

        if ($differencesCount -ne 0)
        {
            $workingCopy.Save($file.FullName) | Out-Null
            $modifiedfiles += $file.FullName
        }
    }

    return $modifiedfiles
}

$rootDirectory = Join-Path (Split-Path -Parent $MyInvocation.MyCommand.Path) "\..\..\"

$exitCode = 0;

$changedfiles = @()
$changedfiles += AutoFix-AppConfig($rootDirectory)
$changedfiles += AutoFix-CsProj($rootDirectory)
$changedfiles += AutoFix-WebConfig($rootDirectory)

if ($changedfiles.Count -gt 0)
{
    Write-Host "=== git hooks ==="
    Write-Host "The following files have been auto-formatted"
    Write-Host "to reduce the likelyhood of merge conflicts:"
    
    foreach($file in $changedfiles)
    {
        Write-Host $file
    }

    $exitCode = 1;
}

exit $exitcode

Save this script in the folder .git\hooks\ with the name AutoFix-VisualStudioFiles.ps1.

Did you know… Ryan Hellyer accidentally leaked his Amazon AWS access keys to GitHub and woke up to a $6,000 bill the next morning. Wouldn’t you just expect the source control as clever as git to just stop you from making such a blender?

In order to put in action, simply make some changes in your repository and commit the code. This will invoke the pre-commit event which will intern invoke this script. The result, your configuration files and csproj files will be organized. Watch the video below on how you can do this working for a Git repository in VSTS on Windows (Start the video at 8:45 to directly jump into this example of doing this with PowerShell)…