Locking a branch, so that it cannot be staged/committed into? (Only merged/etc)

Question

I have a master/develop branching system that i have come to love, but it comes with a basic rule. No commits are done on develop or master, only merges. This is great, but recently i accidentally made some changes/commits on my develop branch and it annoys the tar out of me.

I looked into moving the ownership of those commits from develop into another already existing branch (We'll call it work), the one i should have been working on in the first place, but i decided to just let this one go. Instead, i'd like to fix the issue to begin with.. How does one go about locking a branch, so that commit simply doesn't work on it for traditional, normal changes?

Eg, if you made changes on a "locked" branch, you couldn't git add nor could you git commit -a. I suppose technically i'm asking to lock staging, but you get the idea. Any thoughts on this? Or would i simply be better off learning git well enough that i know how to fix commit parent issues?

Answer 1

Copy this:

#!/bin/bash

if [[ `git symbolic-ref HEAD` == "refs/heads/master" ]]
then
    echo "You cannot commit in master!"
    exit 1
fi

into a file named pre-commit in .git/hooks/

It will prevent you from commiting into the branch master. You can easily customize it to add more branches or to personalize the error message and so on.

---

BTW, a useful trick to know when you made modifications in master but you want to commit them in somebranch is to do:

git stash
git checkout somebranch
git stash apply

and then you are in somebranch with your modifications ready to commit!