get commit message in git hook

Question

I would like to check commit message before git commit. I use pre-commit hook to do that, but couldn\'t find the way to get commit message in .git/pre-commit script. How cou

Answer 1

In the pre-commit hook, the commit message usually hasn't been created yet ¹. You probably want to use one of the prepare-commit-msg or commit-msg hooks instead. There's a nice section in Pro Git on the order in which these hooks are run, and what you typically might do with them.

_{1. The exception is that the committer might have supplied a commit message with -m, but the message still isn't accessible to the pre-commit hook, whereas it is to prepare-commit-msg or commit-msg}