Way back in the day we used to use Campfire and Subversion. Time happened, it’s the future, and now we use Present.ly and Git. Remember how those commit messages would just show up in Campfire whenever anyone did an svn commit -m ‘whatever’? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to publish Git commit messages to Present.ly just like the old days with Campfire and Subversion?

We can do it. We’ve been doing it. We’re doing it right now.

The first thing you’ll need to know is that Git has hooks. Lots of them. They live in the hidden ‘.git/hooks’ folder in your project. Their names are relatively descriptive and tell you when these hooks will fire. The one we’re particularly interested in right now is ‘.git/hooks/post-commit’.

Open up that file, there’s stuff in there, delete it and add the following hotness instead:

Once you’ve updated your account, username, password, and the group to which you want to send your messages – you need to make this bad man active so it will fire at your will. The zombies will never see it coming:

chmod +x .git/hooks/post-commit

Keep in mind that none of these hooks will fire unless they are marked as executable. This will bite you; it did me, and I’m still recovering. It’s okay son, that’s how we earn our stripes.

Make some changes, queue ‘em up, hit commit, and BLAM: you’re knee deep in dead zombies and commit messages! But how do you kill something that’s already dead…