I’m using the post-commit hook to send out E-mail notifications when changes are committed to Subversion repositories.

If you search the web you’ll find a ton of scripts in various languages for this purpose. They all do more or less the same thing: create an E-mail message for the commit, including such details as the revision author, number, timestamp, a list of the paths that were changed, and a diff of the changes.

For one particular project I wanted the diff as an attachment, though, rather than inline in the message text. So I ended up writing my own script. It’s a Shell script that should work on most Unix/Linux based systems.

Source code

Installation instructions

To install this for your repository:

1. Copy commit-report.sh to the server hosting your repository, for instance to /usr/local/bin, and make sure it’s executable (run chmod +x commit-report.sh)
2. Check line #2 of commit-report.sh – you may need to change that address depending on your individual circumstances I removed this item later: see this comment
3. Edit line #2 of the file post-commit: change /path/to to the correct path for your server, e.g. /usr/local/bin
4. Edit line #2 of the file post-commit: you probably don’t want to send reports to foo and bar at foo.local but to some other address(es)
5. If you want a fancy name in the subject line, instead of “SVN: `basename-of-your-repository`” append -name "Your fancy name here" to line #2 in post-commit
6. If you haven’t used the post-commit hook yet, copy the file post-commit to the hooks directory in your repository – Note: Don’t check it in, but copy it to the respository itself, e.g. in /srv/svn/repositories/myrepo/hooks
7. If you’ve already used the post-commit hook, and it’s a Shell script, append line #2 of the file post-commit to your script. If it’s not a Shell script you’ll have to figure out a way to call commit-report.sh with the correct parameters in your language

You can always test commit-report.sh by invoking it manually.

Troubleshooting

Update: Pointers for troubleshooting have been added later, based on your feedback…

• If the script runs without any errors on the console, but you never receive a commit report, change line #2 of commit-report.sh: put something like FROMADDRESS="youremail@yourdomain" in here