You're forgetting that there are other types of hooks besides post-receive. "The first script to run when handling a push from a client is pre-receive. It take

You're forgetting that there are other types of hooks besides post-receive. "The first script to run when handling a push from a client is pre-receive. It takes a list of references that are being pushed from stdin; if it exits non-zero, none of them are accepted. You can use this hook to do things like make sure none of the updated references are non-fast-forwards; or to check that the user doing the pushing has create, delete, or push access or access to push updates to all the files they’re modifying with the push." http://git-scm.com/book/en/Customizing-Git-Git-Hooks http://git-scm.com/book/en/Customizing-Git-Git-Hooks