If you’re like me; sometimes you’ll get cranking on some code and before you realize it, you push your changes back up with the help of tab completion auto-populating your branch for you… which was master. You quickly realize the pain you’re in as all kinds of amazing build processes kick off with the ceremonious event of a new master build! After doing this twice in a year I decided to find a way to help prevent myself from doing it again.

To take advantage of this you’ll need git at version 1.8.2 or higher as it uses a pre-push hook.

First things first. If you haven’t yet you’ll want to set up your own template directory to use with git. From your terminal run the following commands:

mkdir -p ~/.git_template/hooks
git config --global init.templatedir '~/.git_template'

Create a pre-push hook like this (make sure it’s set to executable)

#!/bin/bash
 
protected_branch='master'
current_branch=$(git symbolic-ref HEAD | sed -e 's,.*/\(.*\),\1,')
 
if [ $protected_branch = $current_branch ]
then  
    read -p "You're about to push master, is that what you intended? [y|n] " -n 1 -r < /dev/tty
    echo
    if echo $REPLY | grep -E '^[Yy]$' > /dev/null
    then
        exit 0 # push will execute
    fi
    exit 1 # push will not execute
else  
    exit 0 # push will execute
fi

This creates a directory and tells git that any repository initialized should pull in these files as part of the .git structure. This means you won’t have to worry about adding the pre-push hook to any future git repos you clone. For any existing repos doing a simple git init should pull in the changes you want.

The pre-push hook checks if the branch you are working from is master and will warn you about your attempt to push to master. This forces you to stop and think about it before answering with a Y if that is truely want you want to do.