How to support push --force-with-lease but not git push --force?

[Eric Pederson]

We have the Reject Force Push hook turned on in our Bitbucket server which is a godsend for most situations but it prevents a real need which is rebasing a topic branch that is undergoing code review in a PR.   For example you might want to:

• Interactively rebase, squashing commits, fixing commit messages, etc.
• Rebase --onto another branch.

Let's focus on the first use case because that would be possible with --force-with-lease.  (It expects the remote ref to be the same as on the tracking branch, and that wouldn't be the case with rebase --onto).

Can a server-side hook tell if a push is --force-with-lease vs. --force?  If so then it would be an easy modification to the existing hook.  If not then we would need to use an addon like Control Freak which can let you allow push --force for certain branch types but not others.

[Julius Davies [bit-booster.com] · Accepted solution]

Hi,

I maintain Control Freak so I'm very familiar with this problem.

Unfortunately there is no way to detect "--force-with-lease" on the server side.  The logic behind "--force-with-lease" is based on data only available to the git client.  The server does not have this data and so it cannot tell the difference between regular "--force" and "--force-with-lease".  On the server side those pushes are indistinguishable.

The git server does not track every time every possible git client has run "git pull" or "git fetch"  - that's the data the server would need if it wanted to implement this.

[Eric Pederson]

Thanks Sylvie.  That's what I figured but I wanted to verify.