Understand the concept

Create a pre-commit hook to restrict commits to the main branch.

Create a file named pre-commit in .git/hooks directory.

#!/bin/bash

branch="$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)"

if [ "$branch" = "main" ]; then
  echo "You can't commit directly to main branch"
  exit 1
fi

Points to note.

• This can be easily bypassed.
• GitHub offers branch protection which is a paid feature.
• This file doesn't get pushed to the remote repository. So, this won't work for a team.

For the team

The trick is create the above discussed file as part of the build process.

For gradle projects, add the following to build.gradle file.

task createPreCommitHook(type: Copy) {
    from new File(rootProject.rootDir, 'scripts/pre-commit')
    into { new File(rootProject.rootDir, '.git/hooks')}
    fileMode 0775
}

Create a file named pre-commit in scripts directory with the content as discussed above.

You can verify the file is created by running ./gradlew build command.