Question

In git, it is up to each user to specify the correct author in their local git config file. When they push to a centralized bare repository, the commit messages on the repository will have the author names that they used when committing to their own repository.

Is there a way enforce that a set of known authors for commits are used? The ‘central’ repository will be accessible via ssh.

I know that this is complicated by the fact that some people may be pushing commits that were made by others. Of course, you should also only allow people you trust to push to your repositories, but it would be great if there was a way to prevent user error here.

Is there a simple solution to this problem in git?

Answer 1

We use the following to prevent accidental unknown-author commits (for example when doing a fast commit from a customer’s server or something). It should be placed in .git/hooks/pre-receive and made executable.

#!/usr/bin/env python # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- import subprocess from itertools import islice, izip import sys  old, new, branch = sys.stdin.read().split()  authors = {     'John Doe': '[e-mail]' }  proc = subprocess.Popen(['git', 'rev-list', '--pretty=format:%an%n%ae%n', '%s..%s' % (old, new)], stdout=subprocess.PIPE) data = [line.strip() for line in proc.stdout.readlines() if line.strip()]  def print_error(commit, author, email, message):     print '*' * 80     print 'ERROR: Unknown Author!'     print '-' * 80     proc = subprocess.Popen(['git', 'rev-list', '--max-count=1', '--pretty=short', commit], stdout=subprocess.PIPE)     print proc.stdout.read().strip()     print '*' * 80     raise SystemExit(1)  for commit, author, email in izip(islice(data, 0, None, 3), islice(data, 1, None, 3), islice(data, 2, None, 3)):     _, commit_hash = commit.split()     if not author in authors:         print_error(commit_hash, author, email, 'Unknown Author')     elif authors[author] != email:         print_error(commit_hash, author, email, 'Unknown Email')