Filtering Subversion Commits Using a Post Commit Hook

At the end of a successful commit phase Subversion invokes a post commit hook, if it exists. The post commit hook is an executable file that must be named $SVNREPO/hooks/post-commit. The post commit hook is passed two parameters:

1. The repository affected by the commit operation.
2. The committed revision number.

With these parameters you can find out the changes that affected the repository using the svnlook command:

$ svnlook changed -r [revision] [repository]

If your post-commit hook is a shell script, you can just use:

[...snip...]

svnlook changed -r "$2" "$1"

[...snip...]

Unless you can control which the $PATH environment variable will be at the time of the hook execution, be sure to use full command paths in your scripts to avoid path related errors.

Example

If you want to filter out a file name, for example web.xml, from svnlook output, you can use the following syntax (please note that the following uses Solaris-specific commands):

MODIFICATIONS=$(/opt/csw/bin/svnlook changed -r "$2" "$REPOS")

for i in "$MODIFICATIONS" ; do

  echo $i | /usr/xpg4/bin/grep -q "web.xml$"

  if [ $? == 0 ] ; then

    # The $CHANGES variable of this example will contain

    # the list of the To: addresses for the current email.

    echo $i | mailx -s "Web Config files have been modified" $CHANGES

  fi

done

Solaris Specific Syntax

The -q option for the command grep is supported by the XPG4 version of the grep command, which is bundled with Solaris and installed by default in the /usr/xpg4/bin directory.

Note about sending an email on Solaris

To send an email on an UNIX system without worrying about the specific infrastructure configuration, you should use a command that relies on the local SMTP server instance, if available. Such a program is mailx. Solaris is bundled with a Sendmail instance and with the mailx program. When sending an email with mailx, it will internally invoke the local sendmail which must be properly configured in order to relay the message to the message destination.