pre-receive git hooks for checking the commit message

pre-receive.sh

#!/bin/bash
#
# check commit messages for pivotal tracker issue numbers formatted as [#stort-id]along with commit message
REGEX="\[#[0-9]*\]"
ERROR_MSG="[POLICY] The commit doesn't reference a PIVOTAL tracker issue"

while read OLDREV NEWREV REFNAME ; do
  for COMMIT in `git rev-list $OLDREV..$NEWREV`;
  do
    MESSAGE=`git cat-file commit $COMMIT | sed '1,/^$/d'`
    if ! echo $MESSAGE | grep -iqE "$REGEX"; then
      echo "$ERROR_MSG: $MESSAGE" >&2
      exit 1
    fi
  done
done
exit 0

I found this extremely helpful, searched for hours before I found this!!

I wanted to only check the first commit line, adding q to the sed command only checks the commit 'message' and not the 'description'
sed '1,/^$/d;q'