GitFlow

Git Flow

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Navigation

• Overview
• Strategy
  • Main Branch
  • Develop Branch
  • Feature Branches
  • Release Branches
  • Hotfix branches
  • Support branches
  • Further Reading

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Strategy

• When using the git-flow extension library, executing git flow init  on an existing repo will create the develop  branch

Main Branch

• stores the official release history
• tag all commits to main with a version number

Develop Branch

• integration branch for features

Feature Branches

• feature branches should never interact directly with main
• When a feature is complete, it gets merged back into develop as their parent branch
• created off of the latest on the develop branch

Release Branches

• Once develop has acquired enough features for a release or a release is approaching a due date, fork a release branch off of develop
  • this starts the release cycle
• Once a release cycle is started
  • NO new features can be added after this point
  • ONLY bug fixes, documentation generation, and other release-oriented tasks
• When ready to ship your release:
  • Merge the release branch into main
    • tag it and version it
  • Merge the release branch into develop
• Benefits of this:
  • multi team collaboration to allow dedicated resources to work on release, while others work on new features for next cycle

Hotfix branches

• Works directly with main branch
• very similar to release and feature branches
  • based on main instead of develop (which release and feature branches rely on)
• Used to quickly patch production releases
• also similar to the release branch, hotfix branch gets merged into both main and develop once finished
• Benefits of this:
  • hotfix or maintenance branches allow your teams to address issues without interrupting the rest of the workflow or waiting for the next release cycle

Support branches

• Usually not used for smaller projects
• Essential if maintaining multiple major versions in parallel
• Can be used to support minor or major releases
  • support/<major>.x
    • i.e support/1.x
  • support/<major>.<minor>.x or support/<major>.<minor>.0
    • i.e support/1.3.x or support/1.3.0

Further Reading

Gitflow Workflow | Atlassian Git Tutorial

Creating a branch to work on an issue - GitHub Docs

Linking a pull request to an issue - GitHub Docs

About code owners - GitHub Docs