Question

We’ve got VisualSVN Server set up as our Subversion server on Windows, and we use Ankhsvn + TortoiseSVN as clients on our workstations.

How can you configure the server to require commit messages to be non-empty?

Answer 1

VisualSVN Server 3.9 provides the VisualSVNServerHooks.exe check-logmessage pre-commit hook that helps you reject commits with empty or short log messages. See the article KB140: Validating commit log messages in VisualSVN Server for instructions.

Besides the built-in VisualSVNServerHooks.exe, VisualSVN Server and SVN in general uses a number of hooks to accomplish tasks like this.

• start-commit — run before commit transaction begins, can be used to do special permission checking
• pre-commit — run at the end of the transaction, but before commit. Often used to validate things such as a non zero length log message.
• post-commit — runs after the transaction has been committed. Can be used for sending emails, or backing up repository.
• pre-revprop-change — runs before a revision property change. Can be used to check permissions.
• post-revprop-change — runs after a revision property change. Can be used to email or backup these changes.

You need to use the pre-commit hook. You can write it yourself in just about any language your platform supports, but there are a number of scripts on the web. Googling ‘svn precommit hook to require comment’ I found a couple that looked like they would fit the bill:

• Perl Script
• Python Script