A git pre-receive hook to reject binaries and large files.
This hook prevents users from committing binary files and files greater than 1MB. This can be easily altered, or either restriction can be disabled. To override the restrictions, add 'override restrictions' to the commit message corresponding to the problematic files.
This hook must be installed server-side in the hooks subdirectory. It is only triggered when a user pushes to the server. Committing locally will not be affected. This means that if a commit is made with a binary, the user won't notice the problem until they try to push to the server. To fix the problem, the user will have to make judicious use of git rebase -i to remove the commit, edit it to remove the problematic files, or edit the message to add the override text.
For use with gitolite, the hook must be installed in the repo-specific local code directory known to the git user and the gitolite system. See here:
http://gitolite.com/gitolite/non-core.html#rsh
My pre-receive hook, which I originally called 'check-binary', is based off of two other pre-receive hooks that I found on github:
https://github.com/avar/pre-receive-reject-binaries
https://github.com/amacneil/git-banish-large-files
However, because pre-receive hooks cannot be chained (you can only have one at a time), I had to manually write my own to combine the features I wanted from both of the above hooks.
I've also included a bonus pre-commit hook for preventing merge markers (<<<<<<<, >>>>>>>, =======) from being left in a commit. It's careful enough to only check for those symbols at the start of a line, with the exact count, followed by a space or newline. I've considered including this in the pre-receive hook as well but have not yet.