Ever find yourself manually running linters, formatters, or static analysis tools before committing your code, only to forget a step or discover a rule violation post-commit? This repetitive friction can slow down your development workflow and increase the likelihood of introducing bugs. Claude Code, through its powerful hook system, allows you to integrate your favorite Model Context Protocol (MCP) tools directly into your Git workflow, ensuring consistency and catching issues early.
Claude Code’s hooks configuration in .claude/settings.json lets you define shell commands that execute at specific Git event points. By leveraging this, you can set up a pre-commit hook to automatically run your MCP-compatible tools. This ensures that your code is always in a desired state before it even enters your version control history, saving you time and preventing embarrassing mistakes.
Here’s how you can configure a pre-commit hook to run an MCP tool that validates your code. This example assumes you have an MCP tool installed and executable, and we’ll use a placeholder command mcp-validator for demonstration. The claude CLI itself is used to manage the hooks.
{
"hooks": {
"pre-commit": [
"echo 'Running MCP validator...'",
"mcp-validator --config .mcpconfig",
"echo 'MCP validation complete.'"
]
}
}
To apply this configuration and make it active, you need to use the claude CLI command. Navigate to your project’s root directory in your terminal, where your .git folder resides, and then execute the following:
claude hooks apply
This command reads your .claude/settings.json and sets up the Git hooks. Now, every time you attempt to commit, the commands defined under pre-commit will execute. If any of these commands fail (return a non-zero exit code), your commit will be aborted, prompting you to fix the issues before proceeding.
Try it: Create a .claude/settings.json file in your project root with the example JSON above, then run claude hooks apply. Stage some changes and try to commit. If mcp-validator were a real tool that failed, the commit would be blocked.