In working on cpan-security-advisory I often have a problem being behind master because I have GitHub Actions that update files on a schedule so I can release every Sunday. That’s annoying.

My next big problem is hand-editing a YAML file that turns out to be invalid, screwing up everything. I have tests for those, of course, but do I always run them? Of course I don’t.

So, I broke down and created a pre-push hook, but I also needed some extra features. That is, I iterated with Claude, which is much better than I at bash syntax.

First, I only run this hook when I try to push to GitHub. I also push to at least three other services for redundancy, and I don’t need to run the tests every item. And, even if I do want to do that, I have a bit to store a semaphore under .git that uses the current rev.

Then I run the tests I want, in this case a bunch of Perl files managed by prove. If the tests pass, meaning all the file formats check out, exit with 0, and if they have problems, exit with something that is not zero.

#!/bin/sh

.git/hooks/pre-push

remote_url=”$2”

only test when pushing to GitHub

case “$remote_url” in github.com[:/]) ;; *) exit 0 ;; esac

stamp=”$(git rev-parse –git-dir)/pre-push-tested” head=$(git rev-parse HEAD)

only trust the cache when the working tree is clean and matches HEAD

clean() { [ -z “$(git status –porcelain)” ]; }

if clean && [ -f “$stamp” ] && [ “$(cat “$stamp”)” = “$head” ]; then echo “Tests already passed for $head; skipping.” exit 0 fi

echo “Checking author tests before push…” if prove -lr xt; then clean && echo “$head” > “$stamp” exit 0 else echo “Tests failed; push aborted. (can push with –no-verify)” exit 1 fi