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Have Git Email Committers After Pushes

You need a Mail Transfer Agent MTA on the server. The easiest way is to install Sendmail, which Git uses by default.

apt-get install sendmail

Remember that /etc/hosts file needs the ip address to map to the domain name your sending mail from

# vim /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost localhost.localdomain
207.136.202.87 wwwexample.com

Sendmail has a tendency to hang when sending mail otherwise. To test sendmail

sendmail email@example.com
this is a test
how are you today world?
.

The period on a line by itself denotes end of message and will terminate the prompt and deliver the message. Now you need to configure Git to send email after it receives a "push" from a committer. You can add email addresses, or you can set up a mailing list to email all members. Either way, you accomplish this with the following command, just remember to cd into the git repository.

git config --add hooks.mailinglist "mailinglist@example.com"

Next you need to activate the post-receive hook, located in the hooks directory of your repository.

cp post-receive.sample post-receive

And uncomment the last line, which uses sendmail to deliver the commit message

# uncomment the last line but keep the period "."
. /usr/share/doc/git-core/contrib/hooks/post-receive-email

All done. Now just make some changes to your source code, add and commit them and you should receive an email with all the details!

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