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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-16T03:58:59+00:00

I’ve been searching all day for a way to get changes made server-side (like

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I’ve been searching all day for a way to get changes made server-side (like when WordPress installs a new plugin update or someone uploads something) to be committed to my Git repository I use for site deployment. This is the closest I got:

#!/bin/sh
git --git-dir=/home/cameronm/git/cameronmalek.git --work-tree=/home/cameronm/public_html/ checkout -f master
git --work-tree=/home/cameronm/public_html/ diff --exit-code &>-
if [ "$?" -ne 0 ]; then
    git --work-tree="/home/cameronm/public_html/" add .;
    git --work-tree="/home/cameronm/public_html/" commit -m "automated server-side update";
fi

The issue with this solution, and the reason for this post, is that it all happens in the wrong order. I’m looking for a way to commit all changes made by other non-Git parties to the live website directory BEFORE my update gets pushed through. The reason for this is that I want to be able to potentially see merge conflicts if the update I’m trying to push overwrites something that was added to the server recently.

I’ve been up all night trying to figure this one out. It’s kind of a hard problem to describe (and Google for) so just shoot me a note if I can clarify anything for you.

Thanks for any help offered!

Update!

You can see my working solution (separate pre-receive and post-receive hooks) on my Gists page. Here’s the pre-receive hook and the post-receive hook.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    What you are trying to do is kind of tricky, as you can not push to a remote branch if there is any commit in there that you do not have locally – conflict or not. If you are fine with that, you are quite on the right track. I am assuming you set that script above as your post-recieve hook? You just need to set it as a pre-recieve hook and return non-zero if there are modifications. You might also want to echo an error message to the user, telling him what’s going on.

    If that happens the push will fail and the user will have to pull before he can push (as the push is no longer a fast-forward).

    But why are you doing a checkout before you check for changes?

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