Hg setting up pre-hook to not allow commits when there are unknown files

By default Hg will not warn you about the files created, but not yet added. This can result in a situation where you have created a commit, but that commit does not include newly created files. Everything seems fine, but the push is incomplete.... and you transfer to a new machine and you're missing files, or your colleagues are confused. This happened to me a couple of times, so I looked for ways to avoid it in the future. Admittedly, it's not hard to check for status every time before a commit, but you can still forget it sometimes. I usually dealt with this with an com --amend option after realizing I forgot to hg add, but there is a saying "if something bothers you more then 3 times within a week, make sure to fix it." So, here's how.

Posted by Gru on 19 August 2016.

First, you will need my command line utility. It's a trivial thing that only returns a status code based on whether there was some standard input piped in. AnyStdIn.zip This will only work on 64-bit OS-es (Windows). Make sure it's on your Path system variable.

Second, you need to modify your .hg/hgrc file inside the repository that you want this hook to be relevant to. I prefer to have this for all repos, so I put it inside mercurial.ini file. What this does is creates a "hook" that will fire before the commit event, it will list all "untracked files", and if there are any they will be piped into AnyStdIn.exe, which will return status code 1 and abort the commit.

[hooks]
precommit.No_Untracked_Files = hg st -u | AnyStdIn

And... that's it. If there are untracked files, the message will be something like:

abort: precommit.No_Untracked_Files hook exited with status 1

If for any reason you'd want to avoid this check you'd have to temporarily comment this hook's line.

Hg setting up pre-hook to not allow commits when there are unknown files

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