Preventing pushes to our develop branches, but allowing pull request merges.

Question

We are quite new to GIT and Stash, and getting on really well.  Stash in a branching/merging flow works very well for us.  We use Pull requests to manage reviewing.

One thing that sometimes trips us up, is if a developer forgets to branch, they can comit and push their code directly on dev, bypassing the pull request review phase.

How can we prevent this? Seems like a massive hole, and one that must surely be simply solved?  However looking around I am not coming up with much in the way of answers..

Thanks.

Balázs Szakmáry · Answer

This would also be a possible solution if you are OK with auto merges. (I wonder what happens if there is a merge conflict, but that is a sidetrack.)

Personally, I prefer having a human actually make a conscious decision about when the merge button should be pressed. (e.g. It might be that one of the reviewers still has something critical to say when the pre-set percentage of the others has already approved and the server auto-merges the code.)

Mark Gillespie4 · Answer

Wondering if WorkZone and it's AutoMerge is the answer?  Can we remove write permission to our dev branch and allow WorkZone to do all the merging?

Balázs Szakmáry · Answer

(Server-side) hooks are little Java modules that run on the server at certain events. If you want to write the hook, start here. There is a very good SDK and fairly many examples available.

Once you write the pre-receive hook, deploy it to your server (can be enabled/disabled per repo) and then it accepts/rejects the pushes based on the code in it.