Use a Git hook to push it when you push it

When I heard Paul Irish mention in passing in his JSConf talk that a certain company’s Git repo box would play Salt-n-Pepa’s Push It every time somebody…pushed it, every geeky molecule in my being screamed WANT. It ended up being a tad trickier than I had hoped, but some things in life are worth the extra effort.

Here’s what you need:

  • A command-line client that can play mp3 files. VLC has a command line component (cvlc) that works nicely.
  • A mp3 of Push It by Salt-n-Pepa (you know you have it).
Git allows you to automate tasks on certain Git actions. These are called hooks, and they are located in the .git/hooks folder of your repo. For the repo you are pushing to, you can use the post-receive hook. Make it look something like this (Linux): 
#!/bin/sh
#
# Plays Push It when I push it. 
#


exec  cvlc ~/Music/Salt-n-Pepa/Push\ It.mp3 –start-time=14 –stop-time=60 –play-and-exit &

Don’t forget to chmod +x it, and viola - after a push to the repo, the repo machine (hopefully yours) will start jamming.

Unfortunately there is no client-side post-push in Git. That means you won’t be getting your jam on when you commit to a Github repo via a standard hook. This is where a normal person would have hung up their geek-cleats. I am not a normal person.

Create a .git/hooks/post-push file and make it just like the above. Then head to your .git/config file and tack this on the end:

[alias]
    xpush = !git push $! $2 && $(git rev-parse --git-dir)/hooks/post-push

Here we’re making an alias to push called xpush that does what the standard push does and then executes our post-push hook. Then give it a git xpush -u origin master off to Github and prepare to boogie.