Automatically run tasks after Git Clone without using git hooks

Question

Is it possible to run automatically a .bash script after running git clone ..repo.. inside the terminal? At first I wanted to run commands like rm -rf .git and composer install inside the post-checkout hook but this file can only be used locally. So are there other options to do this?

Answer 1

mkdir ~/global_hooks
#create and edit the post-checkout inside
echo '#!/bin/bash' >> ~/global_hooks/post-checkout
echo 'rm -rf .git' >> ~/global_hooks/post-checkout
#...
chmod 755 ~/global_hooks/post-checkout
git config --global core.hooksPath ~/global_hooks/

Any new clone with a checkout (without -n or --mirror or --bare) will trigger ~/global_hooks/post-checkout and .git will be removed. But this is not a good idea because you'll have to enable and disable the hook for different clones. Besides, every user needs to make the configuration, so it's a bit annoying.

What's worse, a git-checkout in a repository without disabling or overriding the global hook will remove its .git. So this is just for fun but not practical at all.

Edit 2022-06-02:

Some improvements to make it a bit more practical.

First, DO NOT run git config --global core.hooksPath ~/global_hooks/.

Second, update ~/global_hooks/post-checkout

#!/bin/bash

enable=$(git config --get my.fun)
if [[ "${enable}" = yes ]];then
    echo Removing .git
    rm -rf .git
fi

Now it's possible to enable or disable the hook according to demand.

By default, a new clone or checkout does not invoke the hook, so the .git is safe.

When you really want to remove .git after it's cloned, add 2 options to git.

git -c core.hookspath=~/global_hooks/ -c my.fun=yes clone $repo_url -b $branch

-c foo.bar=baz is a temporary configuration value which works only for this git command. my.fun is a customized configuration word and you could replace it with other words you like.

Answer 2

So, you want a repo configured such that when someone clones it, it immediately turns around and deletes everything but the work tree (making it no longer a clone of the repo)? No, git does not have a way to do that.

If you just want to automate these steps because you have some frequent use case for it (maybe an unusual deployment mechanism?), then you can write a wrapper script to be run in lieu of the git clone command.

But if you literally want this triggered by the git clone command itself, that's not possible. (It's also not useful; but that's none of my business.)