Automate a checkpatch run on commit¶

Copyright¶

The material has been taken from here (author is Stefan Hajnoczi).

How to automatically run checkpatch.pl when developing QEMU¶

The checkpatch.pl script was recently added to qemu.git as a way to scan patches for coding standard violations. You can automatically run checkpatch.pl when committing changes to git and abort if there are violations:

$ cd qemu
$ cat >.git/hooks/pre-commit
#!/bin/bash
exec git diff --cached | scripts/checkpatch.pl --no-signoff -q -
^D
$ chmod 755 .git/hooks/pre-commit

Any commit that violates the coding standard as checked by checkpatch.pl will be aborted. I am running with this git hook now and will post any tweaks I make to it.
Update : If you encounter a false positive because checkpatch.pl is complaining about code you didn't touch, use git commit --no-verify to override the pre-commit hook. Use this trick sparingly :-).