Automate Git Hooks for Code Quality

Git Hooks Automation sets up Git-level enforcement - linting, formatting, testing, and commit-message validation - that runs in seconds before a commit or push ever reaches CI, across whichever hook mechanism a project uses: raw hooks in .git/hooks/ (not version-controlled, so team-shared setups need a framework), Husky plus lint-staged for Node/TypeScript projects (running checks only on staged files for speed), or the language-agnostic pre-commit framework (YAML-configured, isolated hook environments, works for Python and polyglot repos alike). It covers the eight standard hook points and when each fires - pre-commit, prepare-commit-msg, commit-msg, post-commit, pre-push, pre-rebase, post-merge, post-checkout.

Use it when asked to set up git hooks or pre-commit hooks, configure Husky, lint-staged, or the pre-commit framework, enforce Conventional Commits via commitlint, automate pre-push test runs, or migrate from Husky v4 to v9+. For projects without Node or Python, it also writes portable custom shell hooks shared via core.hooksPath rather than the local-only .git/hooks/ directory - including concrete checks like blocking direct commits to main/master, flagging debug statements (console.log, debugger, binding.pry, import pdb), rejecting files over 1MB, and pattern-matching for leaked secrets such as AWS keys, OpenAI-style sk- keys, GitHub tokens, and hardcoded passwords. Hooks are explicitly positioned as a first line of defense, not the source of truth - CI still re-runs the same checks since hooks can always be bypassed with --no-verify or a per-hook SKIP= variable.

Input: the project's language stack and which checks to enforce at which git event. Output: a working hook configuration - for Husky, .husky/pre-commit running lint-staged, .husky/commit-msg running commitlint against a commitlint.config.js, and .husky/pre-push running the test suite; for the pre-commit framework, a .pre-commit-config.yaml wiring in trailing-whitespace, large-file, and secret-detection checks plus language-specific hooks like black, ruff, and shellcheck.

repos:
  - repo: https://github.com/pre-commit/pre-commit-hooks
    rev: v4.6.0
    hooks:
      - id: trailing-whitespace
      - id: end-of-file-fixer
      - id: check-yaml
      - id: check-added-large-files
        args: ['--maxkb=500']
      - id: detect-private-key

It also diagnoses common failure modes - hooks silently skipped because they were never installed, permission denied from a non-executable hook file, stale hooks from an old setup, or hooks passing locally but failing in CI due to version drift - and recommends gradual adoption on existing projects: formatting first, then linting, then commit-message rules, then a pre-push test runner, to avoid team resistance.

Related skills cover adjacent needs: @codebase-audit-pre-push for a deeper pre-push audit, @verification-before-completion for verifying work before claiming it done, @bash-pro for writing more advanced custom hook scripts, and @github-actions-templates for the CI workflows that back up whatever the hooks enforce locally.

Teams that want fast, team-shared, version-controlled Git-level quality gates - lint, format, commit-message, and test checks - running in under five seconds locally, with CI still enforcing the same rules as the actual source of truth.