Subject: [PATCH 0/1] Add "preparing" phase to reference-transaction hook

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 13 Mar 2026 15:35:35 -0400

From: Eric Ju <[email-masked]>

The "reference-transaction" hook currently exposes three phases to callers:
"prepared", "committed", and "aborted". The earliest of these, "prepared",
fires after Git has already acquired exclusive locks on every affected
reference. This is well-suited for last-chance validation, but it arrives
too late for any use case that requires coordination before locking, such
as serializing concurrent transactions across distributed storage nodes.

This series introduces a new "preparing" phase that fires before
refs->be->transaction_prepare() is called, that is, before Git takes any
reference lock on disk. Hook scripts that handle this phase receive the full
list of proposed updates and may reject the transaction by returning a
non-zero exit status, causing Git to abort cleanly before any locks are
acquired.

The motivating use case is Gitaly/Praefect, GitLab's distributed Git storage
layer. Praefect must serialize concurrent writes that target the same
references across replicas. With only the "prepared" phase available, by the
time Praefect can observe a transaction the locks are already held, making
reordering impossible. The "preparing" phase provides the necessary
pre-lock window.

Compatibility note: this change is not strictly backwards compatible. Hook
scripts that do not expect unknown phase strings may return an error when
they encounter "preparing". We consider this acceptable for the same reasons
cited when symref support was added to the hook in a8ae923f85 (refs: support
symrefs in 'reference-transaction' hook, 2024-05-07): the hook is documented
as exposing internal implementation details, and its semantics have been
adjusted before. An alternative of introducing a "reference-transaction-v2"
hook was considered but rejected as unnecessarily heavyweight.

Eric Ju (1):
  Add preparing state to reference-transaction hook

 Documentation/githooks.adoc      | 19 ++++++++++++-------
 refs.c                           |  9 ++++++++-
 t/t1416-ref-transaction-hooks.sh | 30 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++----
 t/t5510-fetch.sh                 |  7 ++++++-
 4 files changed, 52 insertions(+), 13 deletions(-)

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2.51.0