Question

I want to update a bare repo, and have it do something after something has been pushed to it using a hook. Which one should I use? The git-scm book says that they both fire after all refs have been updated, so I don’t know what the difference is.

Answer 1

From the documentation:

post-receive:

This supersedes the <post-update> hook in that it gets both old and new values of all the refs in addition to their names.

post-update:

The ‘post-update’ hook can tell what are the heads that were pushed, but it does not know what their original and updated values are, so it is a poor place to do log old..new. The <post-receive> hook does get both original and updated values of the refs. You might consider it instead if you need them.