Sometimes when I accidentally push to the wrong branch in git, things get so crazy I want to head to the beach and play guitar at you:

I just want to push code around,
Well, I will, well, I will
I don’t wanna push to master
No, I don’t, no, I don’t
I wanna take it for granted
Yeah, I wanna take it for granted
Well, I will, well, I will

But seriously, there are few things more annoying than realizing that you accidentally pushed code to the main / master branch instead of a PR branch, especially when branch protection is not enabled for a repository.

Frustratingly, this has happened to me a few times recently, so I wrote a pre-push hook to warn me if I’m about to push into a branch with a name containing main, master or release.

The hook is enabled globally, so if I’m working on a project and try to push to main, I get a warning like:

As it’s a warning, I can still allow the push to continue by pressing Y, but most of the time the warning is sufficient to avoid pushing to the wrong branch by accident.

How do I get it?

You can install the hook from the Github Gist with the following commands:

mkdir -p ~/.githooks
curl https://gist.githubusercontent.com/klcodanr/9cb36294d9e76c0b392b3209241ad900/raw/915f2d42d8dec5a52e1ce72b69e22d17925d6356/pre-push --output ~/.githooks/pre-push
chmod +x ~/.githooks/pre-push
git config --global core.hooksPath ~/.githooks/

Want to try it out first? You can run this Dockerfile to demo the functionality in the ~/local folder:

docker build . -t hook-test
docker run -it hook-test /bin/bash

Hopefully you find the pre-push hook as useful as I do. While ideally this is also enforced at the repository level, but especially when working on multiple legacy projects you can never be sure how the repositories are configured.