If you're a git user (you do use git, right?), there's a powerful feature that can help perform some automatic actions in your repositories - git hooks. In this new post to the SitePoint PHP blog, Timothy Boronczyk introduces you to them and how to set them up.

When certain commands are run, Git searches the .git/hooks directory for suitable hook scripts which are then executed if found. You’ll find a small set of example scripts there (you can activate them by renaming them to remove the .sample prefix and setting their executable bit), and a complete list of hooks can be found in the githooks(5) man page. This article suggests a handful of hooks which can streamline development and help improve your efficiency.

He gives four different examples of checks based on the state of the commit (like pre-commit or post-commit):

• Lint Checks
• Spell-Check Commit Messages
• Checking Standards
• Automatically Run Composer

Each comes with the example code needed to implement them and some description about what they're doing.