Continuous Deployment for Personal CLI Tools

Git pre-push hooks can automate local installation of your personal CLI tools, creating a development workflow where your working environment always has the latest version of your code.

When developing CLI tools, for example for personal use, I often want to run the latest version locally to quickly identify issues and get a feel for changes. Constantly installing updates manually or running from source creates unnecessary friction. This article shows how to automate this process using Git pre-push hooks.

A Simple Solution: Local Continuous Deployment

Automatically installing an updated CLI command locally whenever you push changes to your repository creates a featherweight continuous deployment pipeline. This keeps your local environment in sync with your latest code changes with minimal effort.

What Are Git Hooks?

Git hooks are scripts that Git executes before or after events like commit, push, or receive. Pre-push hooks run automatically before your code is pushed to a remote repository.

Implementation: Git Pre-Push Hooks

The implementation is straightforward. Use git's pre-push hooks to trigger installation automatically:

1. Edit the git pre-push hook file:

vim .git/hooks/pre-push

2. Make it executable:

chmod +x .git/hooks/pre-push

3. Add installation commands to the hook:

#!/bin/sh
install.sh
exit $? # Propagate the exit code

The install.sh script in this example should contain whatever commands you would normally use to install your CLI tool locally. If you use build tools like make or just, you can call those commands directly.

For a tool written in Rust your install.sh script may contain:

cargo install --path .

This approach automatically rebuilds and installs your application on every push to the repository and ensures you're always using the latest version without any manual steps.

Note:

• This works best when developing directly on the main branch. If you work with feature branches, you'll need to consider which version you want running locally at any given time.

• For added robustness, you can extend this approach to run tests or lint your code before installation.

• Hooks are not pushed to your repository by default. You will need to set them up on each development machine.

Thank you for reading, Hans