How to achieve 'pre-checkout' hook in Git/bitbucket?

Question

Result of lots of searching on net is that pre-checkout hook in git is not implemented yet. The reason can be:

• There is no practical use. I do have a case
• It can be achieved by any other means. Please tell me how?
• Its too difficult to implement. I don't think this is a valid reason

Here my problem is:

I have implemented the pre-commit, post-merge & post-checkout hooks for maintaining the database backup different for each branch.

Scenario: Now when I commit the backup of database is saved in a file using pre-commit hook. And when I checkout the the branch or merge occurs the database stored in file is restored using post-merge & post-checkout hooks. Now the situation is if someone make changes in database after commit and checkout, the changes are lost, as database was not backed-up. The checkout succeeded as there is no change in file structure.

So in this case I want a pre-checkout hook to handle the task of backing up database in above scenario.

Answer 1

You could write a script that does your backup then checkout. Then create a shell alias so it runs that script instead when you type git checkout.

Answer 2

Pre-checkout use case: delete un-versioned local files generated by gulp watch:css task so they are overwritten after checkout and rebuilt by gulp.

Instead, I'm just going to write a shell script that gets the repo root and then deletes any of a list of gulp-generated files found.