Ubuntu Manpage: irkerhook - repository hook script issuing irker notifications

NAME

       irkerhook - repository hook script issuing irker notifications

SYNOPSIS

       irkerhook.py [-n] [-V] [[--variable=value...]] [[commit-id...]]

DESCRIPTION

irkerhook.py is a Python script intended to be called from the post-commit hook of a
version-control repository. Its job is to collect information about the commit that fired
the hook (and possibly preferences set by the repository owner) and ship that information
to an instance of irkerd for forwarding to various announcement channels.

The proper invocation and behavior of irkerhook.py varies depending on which VCS
(version-control system) is calling it. There are four different places from which it may
extract information:

1. Calls to VCS utilities.

2. In VCSes like git that support user-settable configuration variables, variables with
the prefix "irker.".

3. In other VCSes, a configuration file, "irker.conf", in the repository's internals
directory.

4. Command-line arguments of the form --variable=value.

The following variables are general to all supported VCSes:

project
The name of the project. Should be a relatively short identifier; will usually appear
at the very beginning of a notification.

repo
The name of the repository top-level directory. If not specified, defaults to a
lowercased copy of the project name.

channels
An IRC channel URL, or comma-separated list of same, identifying channels to which
notifications are to be sent. If not specified, the default is the freenode #commits
channel.

server
The host on which the notification-relaying irker daemon is expected to reside.
Defaults to "localhost".

email
If set, use email for communication rather than TCP or UDP. The value is used as the
target mail address.

tcp
If "true", use TCP for communication; if "false", use UDP. Defaults to "false".

urlprefix
Changeset URL prefix for your repo. When the commit ID is appended to this, it should
point at a CGI that will display the commit through cgit, gitweb or something similar.
The defaults will probably work if you have a typical gitweb/cgit setup.

If the value of this variable is "None", generation of the URL field in commit
notifications will be suppressed. Other magic values are "cgit", "gitweb", and
"viewcvs", which expand to URL templates that will usually work with those systems.

The magic cookies "%(host)s" and %(repo)s" may occur in this URL. The former is
expanded to the FQDN of the host on which irkerhook.py is running; the latter is
expanded to the value of the "repo" variable.

tinyifier
URL template pointing to a service for compressing URLs so they will take up less
space in the notification line. If the value of this variable is "None", no
compression will be attempted.

color
If "mIRC", highlight notification fields with mIRC color codes. If "ANSI", highlight
notification fields with ANSI color escape sequences. Defaults to "none" (no colors).
ANSI codes are supported in Chatzilla, irssi, ircle, and BitchX; mIRC codes only are
recognized in mIRC, XChat, KVirc, Konversation, or weechat.

Note: if you turn this on and notifications stop appearing on your channel, you need
to turn off IRC's color filter on that channel. To do this you will need op
privileges; issue the command "/mode <channel> -c" with <channel> replaced by your
channel name. You may need to first issue the command "/msg chanserv set <channel>
MLOCK +nt-slk".

maxchannels
Interpreted as an integer. If not zero, limits the number of channels the hook will
interpret from the "channels" variable.

This variable cannot be set through VCS configuration variables or irker.conf; it can
only be set with a command-line argument. Thus, on a forge site in which repository
owners are not allowed to modify their post-commit scripts, a site administrator can
set it to prevent shotgun spamming by malicious project owners. Setting it to a value
less than 2, however, would probably be unwise.

cialike
If not empty and not "None" (the default), this emulates the old CIA behavior of
dropping long lists of files in favor of a summary of the form (N files in M
directories). The value must be numeric giving a threshold value for the length of the
file list in characters.

template
Set the template used to generate notification messages. Only available in VCses with
config variables; presently this means git or hg. All basic commit and extractor
fields, including color switches, are available as %() substitutions.

git
Under git, the normal way to invoke this hook (from within the update hook) passes it a
refname followed by a list of commits. Because git rev-list normally lists from most
recent to oldest, you'll want to use --reverse to make notifications be omitted in
chronological order. In a normal update script, the invocation should look like this

refname=$1
old=$2
new=$3
irkerhook.py --refname=${refname} $(git rev-list --reverse ${old}..${new})

except that you'll need an absolute path for irkerhook.py.

For testing purposes and backward compatibility, if you invoke irkerhook.py with no
arguments (as in a post-commit hook) it will behave as though it had been called like
this:

irkerhook.py --refname=refs/heads/master HEAD

However, this will not give the right result when you push to a non-default branch of a
bare repo.

A typical way to install this hook is actually in the post-receive hook, because it gets
all the necessary details and will not abort the push on failure. Use the following
script:

#!/bin/sh

echo "sending IRC notification"
while read old new refname; do
irkerhook --refname=${refname} $(git rev-list --reverse ${old}..${new})
done

For convenience, this is implemented by the irkerhook-git helper script. This script will
complain about some common configuration isssues. For simplicity, irkerhook-git does not
support all the options of irkerhook.py, and is thus not suitable for all applications.

Preferences may be set in the repo config file in an [irker] section. Here is an example
of what that can look like:

[irker]
project = gpsd
color = ANSI
channels = irc://chat.freenode.net/gpsd,irc://chat.freenode.net/commits

You should not set the "repository" variable (an equivalent will be computed). No attempt
is made to interpret an irker.conf file.

The default value of the "project" variable is the basename of the repository directory.
The default value of the "urlprefix" variable is "cgit".

There is one git-specific variable, "revformat", controlling the format of the commit
identifier in a notification. It may have the following values:

raw
full hex ID of commit

short
first 12 chars of hex ID

describe
describe relative to last tag, falling back to short

The default is 'describe'.

Subversion
Under Subversion, irkerhook.py accepts a --repository option with value (the absolute
pathname of the Subversion repository) and a commit argument (the numeric revision level
of the commit). The defaults are the current working directory and HEAD, respectively.

Note, however, that you cannot default the repository argument inside a Subversion
post-commit hook; this is because of a limitation of Subversion, which is that getting the
current directory is not reliable inside these hooks. Instead, the values must be the two
arguments that Subversion passes to that hook as arguments. Thus, a typical invocation in
the post-commit script will look like this:

REPO=$1
REV=$2
irkerhook.py --repository=$REPO $REV

Other --variable=value settings may also be given on the command line, and will override
any settings in an irker.conf file.

The default for the project variable is the basename of the repository. The default value
of the "urlprefix" variable is "viewcvs".

If an irker.conf file exists in the repository root directory (not the checkout directory
but where internals such as the "format" file live) the hook will interpret variable
settings from it. Here is an example of what such a file might look like:

# irkerhook variable settings for the irker project
project = irker
channels = irc://chat.freenode/irker,irc://chat.freenode/commits
tcp = false

Don't set the "repository" or "commit" variables in this file; that would have unhappy
results.

There are no Subversion-specific variables.

Mercurial
Under Mercurial, irkerhook.py can be invoked in two ways: either as a Python hook
(preferred) or as a script.

To call it as a Python hook, add the collowing to the "commit" or "incoming" hook
declaration in your Mercurial repository:

[hooks]
incoming.irker = python:/path/to/irkerhook.py:hg_hook

When called as a script, the hook accepts a --repository option with value (the absolute
pathname of the Mercurial repository) and can take a commit argument (the Mercurial hash
ID of the commit or a reference to it). The default for the repository argument is the
current directory. The default commit argument is '-1', designating the current tip
commit.

As for git, in both cases all variables may be set in the repo hgrc file in an [irker]
section. Command-line variable=value arguments are accepted but not required for script
invocation. No attempt is made to interpret an irker.conf file.

The default value of the "project" variable is the basename of the repository directory.
The default value of the "urlprefix" variable is the value of the "web.baseurl" config
value, if it exists.

Filtering
It is possible to filter commits before sending them to irkerd.

You have to specify the filtercmd option, which will be the command irkerhook.py will run.
This command should accept one arguments, which is a JSON representation of commit and
extractor metadata (including the channels variable). The command should emit to standard
output a JSON representation of (possibly altered) metadata.

Below is an example filter:

#!/usr/bin/env python
# This is a trivial example of a metadata filter.
# All it does is change the name of the commit's author.
#
import sys, json
metadata = json.loads(sys.argv[1])

metadata['author'] = "The Great and Powerful Oz"

print json.dumps(metadata)
# end

Standard error is available to the hook for progress and error messages.

OPTIONS

       irkerhook.py takes the following options:

       -n
           Suppress transmission to a daemon. Instead, dump the generated JSON request to
           standard output. Useful for debugging.

       -V
           Write the program version to stdout and terminate.

AUTHOR

       Eric S. Raymond <esr@snark.thyrsus.com>. See the project page at
       http://www.catb.org/~esr/irker for updates and other resources.

NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

OPTIONS

SEE ALSO

AUTHOR