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I have a master/develop branching system that i have come to love, but it comes with a basic rule. No commits are done on develop or master, only merges. This is great, but recently i accidentally made some changes/commits on my develop branch and it annoys the tar out of me.

I looked into moving the ownership of those commits from develop into another already existing branch (We'll call it work), the one i should have been working on in the first place, but i decided to just let this one go. Instead, i'd like to fix the issue to begin with.. How does one go about locking a branch, so that commit simply doesn't work on it for traditional, normal changes?

Eg, if you made changes on a "locked" branch, you couldn't git add nor could you git commit -a. I suppose technically i'm asking to lock staging, but you get the idea. Any thoughts on this? Or would i simply be better off learning git well enough that i know how to fix commit parent issues?

Cœur
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Lee Olayvar
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    [Git hooks](http://book.git-scm.com/5_git_hooks.html) look like a good start. There's a `pre-commit` hook where you could check things. Not sure how to distinguish between a merge and a normal commit. There's a `post-merge` hook but apparently no `pre-merge`... – Damien Pollet Feb 22 '11 at 02:01

1 Answers1

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Copy this:

#!/bin/bash

if [[ `git symbolic-ref HEAD` == "refs/heads/master" ]]
then
    echo "You cannot commit in master!"
    exit 1
fi

into a file named pre-commit in .git/hooks/

It will prevent you from commiting into the branch master. You can easily customize it to add more branches or to personalize the error message and so on.

BTW, a useful trick to know when you made modifications in master but you want to commit them in somebranch is to do:

git stash
git checkout somebranch
git stash apply

and then you are in somebranch with your modifications ready to commit!

Simon
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