Bypass pre-commit hook during `git revert --continue`

Question

I was doing a git revert (of a previous revert), which caused some merge conflicts. After resolving the conflicts my pre-commit hook threw some code sniffer issues.

Since these code sniffer notices are fixed elsewhere I wanted to bypass the pre-commit hook at this point using git revert --continue --no-verify, apparently git revert doesn't have the --no-verify subcommand.

git revert does have a --no-commit subcommand but this doesn't work in combination with --continue.

I ended up renaming the pre-commit file, but out of curiosity. Is there any better wat to bypass pre-commit hooks at that point?

Answer 1

Changing the hooks

If you are able to change the hooks, you can just add a toggle for each one. Or just use a script to temporarily rename a given hook, as commented.

Either way will selectively skip the problematic hook while letting the other ones run normally. This ensures that other checks occur (if they exist), such as a commit message validation with the commit-msg hook.

Committing

If that does not apply, there is an alternative:

Usually, when an operation is stopped by a conflict, after fixing it you can just run

git commit 

instead of

git $operation --continue 

This applies to revert, merge, cherry-pick and possibly others (although in rebase it might behave differently, since it is a sequence of operations).

So, as noted, to bypass the hooks, you can just add --no-verify:

git commit --no-verify 

---

Note: The feature above seems to be undocumented, but it WorksForMe(tm).

From a diff of strace git commit and strace git revert --continue, the former does a lot of other things (515 vs 173 lines, respectively), such as checking if a rebase is in progress and creating some temporary files in $GIT_DIR/objects. Example:

stat(".git/MERGE_HEAD", 0x7ffefb5d0760) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat(".git/rebase-apply", 0x7ffefb5d0620) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat(".git/rebase-merge", 0x7ffefb5d0620) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat(".git/CHERRY_PICK_HEAD", 0x7ffefb5d0760) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat(".git/BISECT_LOG", 0x7ffefb5d0620) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) stat(".git/REVERT_HEAD", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=41, ...}) = 0 lstat(".git/REVERT_HEAD", {st_mode=S_IFREG|0644, st_size=41, ...}) = 0 openat(AT_FDCWD, ".git/REVERT_HEAD", O_RDONLY) = 4 

But the result appears to be same: They open up the editor with the git-generated message (e.g.: "This reverts commit [...]") and commit after exiting. I have used the alternative form multiple times and never had any problems at least (by the way, I probably discovered it under the same scenario).