Pre-commit Hooks in SmartGit

SmartGit is my preferred Git client mainly due to its excellent visual diff tool that it ships with and the ability to easily manage several repositories.

One small annoyance (aside from the lack of spell-check in commit messages...) is the way it doesn't inherit your user profile (and therefore your PATH environment variable); this leads to pre-commit hooks failing to find build tools such as Node, especially if you have installed via NVM.

Thankfully, syntevo have provided a simple fix for this in SmartGit7; you can now edit the contents of the following file (depending on your OS)

• MacOS: ~/Library/Preferences/SmartGit/smartgit.vmoptions
• Linux: ~/.smartgit/smartgit.vmoptions
• Windows: %APPDATA%\syntevo\SmartGit\smartgit.vmoptions

In my case I needed to expose brew to SmarGit which was as simple as populating my smartgit.vmoptions file with the following:

# Extend SmartGit PATH to include brew / NVM
path=/usr/local/bin

Don't forget to restart SmartGit after saving this file.