git-process.md

Git Process

Overview

• Reserve the master branch for production, staging, and hotfixes
• Write new code on a feature branch
• Rebase feature branches onto master as often as reasonable
• Merge feature branches into master with a no-ff, no-squash merge commit
• Preserve branch names for reference

Starting a feature

git fetch                                    # ensure origin/master is fresh
git checkout -b feature-branch origin/master # create local feature branch based on origin/master
git push -u origin feature-branch            # create remote feature branch and track it locally

During a feature

git fetch                         # get latest remote master
git rebase origin/master          # rebase onto latest remote master
git push -f origin feature-branch # push local rebased changes to remote

Finishing a feature

git checkout master              # start on master
git pull                         # ensure master is fresh
git checkout feature-branch      # change to the feature branch
git pull                         # make sure the feature branch is fresh
git rebase master                # resolve potential conflicts
git checkout master              # change to master
git merge --no-ff feature-branch # create the merge commit
git push                         # avoid conflicts
git branch -d feature-branch     # delete local feature branch

I'd probably change two things:

• You can push and track in the same command with git push -u, at least in newer versions of git
• At one time (still?) I think force pushing without specifying the branch would force push all branches. I use git push origin feature-branch -f to be safe.

Also, it'd be good to address the naming of feature branches. For instance, at Svpply each branch was tied to a ticket in Redmine where we could discuss and track the progress of the feature. The branch names took the format 123-ticket-title-here where 123 was the ticket number and ticket-title-here was a git-friendly reformatting of the ticket title. These titles did their best to be grok-able in terms of what the purpose of the branch was, but the ticket always provided additional context if need be. And the sequential numbers as a prefix helped date them to some extent; it was easy to see which branches were relatively current and which ones were abandoned.

P.S. If you haven't already installed an autocomplete script for git, you should.