Using Subversion Hooks to send out build emails

February 23, 2005

The subversion version control system has a wonderfully handy feature called hooks. Hooks are essentially scripts that are triggered by a version control event (such as a commits, or revision property changes).

Subversion Hooks are located in your repository directory (so if you have multiple repositories you have to setup hooks for each one) in a directory called hooks, perhaps something like this: /home/svn/projectName/hooks. There are template files (.tmpl) in the directory for each event (these files are just examples). The events are:

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.

In your hooks directory you will find a .tmpl file with each of the event names, if you want to enable one of the hooks, copy the template file (without the .tmpl extension) and make it executable.

Note: On windows you need to rename the .tmpl file with an extension that is executable by windows such as an exe or bat file.

If you want to send out a build email on post-commit copy the post-commit.tmpl file to post-commit and make it executable. Edit the file, and add your email addresses.

Subversion comes with a few other pre-built hook scripts, there is a hot-backup.py script that can be used to make hot backups of your repository after commits.

You can find more info about this in the Version control with Subversion book which can also be found here

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Comments

On 02/24/2005 at 3:58:17 AM EST Aslak Hellesoy wrote:

You are describing how to send out emails containing the results of a svn commit, not a *build* of the code in the repository.

But your blog title mentions "build emails". How can you use svn hooks to email results of a build?

Did I miss something?

On 02/24/2005 at 10:35:30 AM EST Pete Freitag wrote:

Hi Aslak,

We actually use subversion hooks to do just that, we send the results of the ant build script and also the svn commit. Basically what you need to do is write the results of your build to a file, and include the contents of the file in the email

On 02/24/2005 at 11:54:52 AM EST Aslak Hellesoy wrote:

Fred, thanks for your reply. Got it.

AFAIK, the various hook scripts execute in a synchronous fashion, keeping the svn client blocked until everything is complete.

In other words, I'm assuming your svn client is blocked until your build is complete (correct me if I'm wrong).

Since commit transactions now become potentially very long (a build of a project typically takes from 10 secs to 30 minutes) - how does this impact your work?

Does svn allow concurrent commits? (I.e. can Sue commit while Fred's commit is in process?) If concurrent commits are not possible, wouldn't your setup potentially cause developers to have to queue up in order to commit their changes?

On 02/24/2005 at 12:25:18 PM EST Pete Freitag wrote:

If you run with a post-commit hook, your svn client returns, and the build goes on in the background, and emails you when its done.

On 02/25/2005 at 3:01:34 PM EST Aslak Hellesoy wrote:

Are you saying that Subversion's post-commit hooks fork a new process? -Or do you fork a process yourself in the post-commit script?

What I mean is that unless there is a fork (done by svn or your hook script), I don't see how the client would *not* hang ?!

On 05/09/2005 at 2:19:16 PM EDT Pete Freitag wrote:

Aslak, The client does not hang, so subversion must fork a new process or thread to handle the post-commit operations.

On 10/25/2005 at 7:02:56 PM EDT Jennifer wrote:

I copied the post-commit template and chmod +x to make it an executable. I also added my email to the post-commit file. I've tried commiting a changed file in the svn repository, but I still don't receive an email about the change.

On 12/21/2005 at 6:30:11 PM EST Armando wrote:

By "edit the file", what the author means, I think, is "configure to your needs."

In my tmpl file, commit-email.pl was getting called, but it is not a program in my $PATH. As the post-commit.tmpl file said, checkout http://svn.collab.net/repos/svn/trunk/tools/hook-scripts/ to find a script, or look to see if commit-email.pl was include in /usr/share somewhere (as packaged by your distro). Then you can copy it somewhere, and call it explicitly.

On 02/23/2006 at 8:06:09 AM EST Mark Andrews wrote:

Hello, Can any one point me to what is needed to enable the revprop change hook when running the SVN server on Windows?

On 07/07/2006 at 5:48:24 PM EDT Joep wrote:

You can also use SVNRevMailer to send e-mail reports. This application does not use hooks, so it needs to be scheduled.

you can find it at: http://dev.nxt.myftp.org/projects/SVNRevMailer/

On 10/09/2006 at 4:49:33 PM EDT Laurens wrote:

SVNRevMailer is a nice tool. I use it a for while now, and the benefit of not being a hook is that you can let it send reports periodically (once a day, for example). So instead of an email per commit (which often means many emails) I receive a daily report containing all commits from the past day, for all repos I check out. This way I keep track of progress of all software I use.

On 10/19/2006 at 2:18:09 AM EDT xutm wrote:

i followed all the steps and the subversion did send a mail when i commit a change, but i found that the from segment of the mail had been changed to something else.How can i change it back to the original one?

On 08/15/2007 at 12:11:03 PM EDT Dave wrote:

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On 12/19/2007 at 10:25:15 PM EST mmckechney wrote:

For windows users, I've created an application that can handle pre-commit and post-commit Subversion hooks. The pre-commit hooks allow you to control what goes into your repository as well as validate commit messages. The post-commit sends out nicely formatted e-mails. This is a SourceForge.net project but is summarized on my site: http://mckechney.com/SubversionNotifyForWindows

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Using Subversion Hooks to send out build emails

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