Git | branches setup (common + gitflow)

Stage and Master Branches

 

Flow

The branches we previously used for staging, trenton-ducati, huntformen and guerilla-porn, are no longer to be used. Instead, their functionality is mirrored by _stage branches.

Same as before, stage branch is common for all the individual whitelabel _stage branches. When a new feature is developed for all whitelabels, it should be pushed to the stage branch and then merged to all the individual whitelabel _stage branches. Whitelabel-specific features and tweaks should be pushed directly to the appropriate _stage branch. The artifacts produced from _stage branches will be deployed to QA and QA-ed as they are now. When the time to deploy to production comes, the appropriate _stage branch should me merged into appropriate _master branch, thus producing a production artifact.

Furthemore, there can be a moment where we're required to perform an emergency fix in production that should only address a specific issue without including the work still being QA-ed. Should such an event occur, we can push the fix directly to the appropriate _master branch. The _master artifact produced would contain only the fix needed, without including the work still QA-ed and therefore avoiding to introduce untested features. Also, after the fix is pushed to _master, _master should be merged into _stage in order to introduce the fix to the QA as well

_stage branches:

trenton-ducati_stage Push to this branch triggers:

• code deployment to https://beta.trentonducati.com/
• creation of stage (QA) artifact, eg. s3://ns-quantox-artifacts/whitelabel/2022-11-13-20-19_whitelabel_trenton-ducati_stage_949a40b0.tar.gz

huntformen_stage Push to this branch triggers:

• code deployment to https://beta.huntformen.com/
• creation of stage (QA) artifact, eg. s3://ns-quantox-artifacts/whitelabel/2022-11-13-20-00_whitelabel_huntformen_stage_d86511e2.tar.gz

nakedsword_stage Push to this branch triggers:

• code deployment to https://guerillaporn.com/
• creation of stage (QA) artifact, eg. s3://ns-quantox-artifacts/whitelabel/2022-11-15-06-32_whitelabel_nakedsword_stage_edb6701d.tar.gz

triple-xxx-ns_stage Push to this branch WILL trigger (not yet implemented):

• code deployment to https://beta.nakedswordxxx.com
• creation of stage (QA) artifact, eg. s3://ns-quantox-artifacts/whitelabel/2023-01-11-01-56_whitelabel_triple-xxx-ns_stage_edb6701d.tar.gz

_master branches:

trenton-ducati_master Push to this branch triggers:

• creation of production artifact, eg. s3://ns-quantox-artifacts/whitelabel/2022-11-13-20-19_whitelabel_trenton-ducati_master_949a40b0.tar.gz

huntformen_master Push to this branch triggers:

• creation of production artifact, eg. s3://ns-quantox-artifacts/whitelabel/2022-11-13-20-00_whitelabel_huntformen_master_d86511e2.tar.gz

nakedsword_master Push to this branch triggers:

• creation of production artifact, eg. s3://ns-quantox-artifacts/whitelabel/2022-11-15-06-32_whitelabel_nakedsword_master_edb6701d.tar.gz

triple-xxx-ns_master Push to this branch WILL trigger (not yet implemented):

• creation of production artifact, eg. s3://ns-quantox-artifacts/whitelabel/2023-01-11-01-56_whitelabel_triple-xxx-ns_master_edb6701d.tar.gz

https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/

 

A successful Git branching model

Note of reflection (March 5, 2020)

This model was conceived in 2010, now more than 10 years ago, and not very long after Git itself came into being. In those 10 years, git-flow (the branching model laid out in this article) has become hugely popular in many a software team to the point where people have started treating it like a standard of sorts — but unfortunately also as a dogma or panacea.

During those 10 years, Git itself has taken the world by a storm, and the most popular type of software that is being developed with Git is shifting more towards web apps — at least in my filter bubble. Web apps are typically continuously delivered, not rolled back, and you don't have to support multiple versions of the software running in the wild.

This is not the class of software that I had in mind when I wrote the blog post 10 years ago. If your team is doing continuous delivery of software, I would suggest to adopt a much simpler workflow (like GitHub flow) instead of trying to shoehorn git-flow into your team.

If, however, you are building software that is explicitly versioned, or if you need to support multiple versions of your software in the wild, then git-flow may still be as good of a fit to your team as it has been to people in the last 10 years. In that case, please read on.

To conclude, always remember that panaceas don't exist. Consider your own context. Don't be hating. Decide for yourself.

In this post I present the development model that I’ve introduced for some of my projects (both at work and private) about a year ago, and which has turned out to be very successful. I’ve been meaning to write about it for a while now, but I’ve never really found the time to do so thoroughly, until now. I won’t talk about any of the projects’ details, merely about the branching strategy and release management.

Why git?

For a thorough discussion on the pros and cons of Git compared to centralized source code control systems, see the web. There are plenty of flame wars going on there. As a developer, I prefer Git above all other tools around today. Git really changed the way developers think of merging and branching. From the classic CVS/Subversion world I came from, merging/branching has always been considered a bit scary (“beware of merge conflicts, they bite you!”) and something you only do every once in a while.

But with Git, these actions are extremely cheap and simple, and they are considered one of the core parts of your daily workflow, really. For example, in CVS/Subversion books, branching and merging is first discussed in the later chapters (for advanced users), while in every Git book, it’s already covered in chapter 3 (basics).

As a consequence of its simplicity and repetitive nature, branching and merging are no longer something to be afraid of. Version control tools are supposed to assist in branching/merging more than anything else.

Enough about the tools, let’s head onto the development model. The model that I’m going to present here is essentially no more than a set of procedures that every team member has to follow in order to come to a managed software development process.

Decentralized but centralized

The repository setup that we use and that works well with this branching model, is that with a central “truth” repo. Note that this repo is only considered to be the central one (since Git is a DVCS, there is no such thing as a central repo at a technical level). We will refer to this repo as origin, since this name is familiar to all Git users.

Each developer pulls and pushes to origin. But besides the centralized push-pull relationships, each developer may also pull changes from other peers to form sub teams. For example, this might be useful to work together with two or more developers on a big new feature, before pushing the work in progress to origin prematurely. In the figure above, there are subteams of Alice and Bob, Alice and David, and Clair and David.

Technically, this means nothing more than that Alice has defined a Git remote, named bob, pointing to Bob’s repository, and vice versa.

The main branches

At the core, the development model is greatly inspired by existing models out there. The central repo holds two main branches with an infinite lifetime:

• master
• develop

The master branch at origin should be familiar to every Git user. Parallel to the master branch, another branch exists called develop.

We consider origin/master to be the main branch where the source code of HEAD always reflects a production-ready state.

We consider origin/develop to be the main branch where the source code of HEAD always reflects a state with the latest delivered development changes for the next release. Some would call this the “integration branch”. This is where any automatic nightly builds are built from.

When the source code in the develop branch reaches a stable point and is ready to be released, all of the changes should be merged back into master somehow and then tagged with a release number. How this is done in detail will be discussed further on.

Therefore, each time when changes are merged back into master, this is a new production release by definition. We tend to be very strict at this, so that theoretically, we could use a Git hook script to automatically build and roll-out our software to our production servers everytime there was a commit on master.

Supporting branches

Next to the main branches master and develop, our development model uses a variety of supporting branches to aid parallel development between team members, ease tracking of features, prepare for production releases and to assist in quickly fixing live production problems. Unlike the main branches, these branches always have a limited life time, since they will be removed eventually.

The different types of branches we may use are:

• Feature branches
• Release branches
• Hotfix branches

Each of these branches have a specific purpose and are bound to strict rules as to which branches may be their originating branch and which branches must be their merge targets. We will walk through them in a minute.

By no means are these branches “special” from a technical perspective. The branch types are categorized by how we use them. They are of course plain old Git branches.

Feature branches

• May branch off from:

  develop

• Must merge back into:

  develop

• Branch naming convention:

  anything except master, develop, release-*, or hotfix-*

Feature branches (or sometimes called topic branches) are used to develop new features for the upcoming or a distant future release. When starting development of a feature, the target release in which this feature will be incorporated may well be unknown at that point. The essence of a feature branch is that it exists as long as the feature is in development, but will eventually be merged back into develop (to definitely add the new feature to the upcoming release) or discarded (in case of a disappointing experiment).

Feature branches typically exist in developer repos only, not in origin.

Creating a feature branch

When starting work on a new feature, branch off from the develop branch.

$ git checkout -b myfeature develop
Switched to a new branch "myfeature"

Incorporating a finished feature on develop

Finished features may be merged into the develop branch to definitely add them to the upcoming release:

$ git checkout develop
Switched to branch 'develop'
$ git merge --no-ff myfeature
Updating ea1b82a..05e9557
(Summary of changes)
$ git branch -d myfeature
Deleted branch myfeature (was 05e9557).
$ git push origin develop

The --no-ff flag causes the merge to always create a new commit object, even if the merge could be performed with a fast-forward. This avoids losing information about the historical existence of a feature branch and groups together all commits that together added the feature. Compare:

In the latter case, it is impossible to see from the Git history which of the commit objects together have implemented a feature—you would have to manually read all the log messages. Reverting a whole feature (i.e. a group of commits), is a true headache in the latter situation, whereas it is easily done if the --no-ff flag was used.

Yes, it will create a few more (empty) commit objects, but the gain is much bigger than the cost.

Release branches

• May branch off from:

  develop

• Must merge back into:

  develop and master

• Branch naming convention:

  release-*

Release branches support preparation of a new production release. They allow for last-minute dotting of i’s and crossing t’s. Furthermore, they allow for minor bug fixes and preparing meta-data for a release (version number, build dates, etc.). By doing all of this work on a release branch, the develop branch is cleared to receive features for the next big release.

The key moment to branch off a new release branch from develop is when develop (almost) reflects the desired state of the new release. At least all features that are targeted for the release-to-be-built must be merged in to develop at this point in time. All features targeted at future releases may not—they must wait until after the release branch is branched off.

It is exactly at the start of a release branch that the upcoming release gets assigned a version number—not any earlier. Up until that moment, the develop branch reflected changes for the “next release”, but it is unclear whether that “next release” will eventually become 0.3 or 1.0, until the release branch is started. That decision is made on the start of the release branch and is carried out by the project’s rules on version number bumping.

Creating a release branch

Release branches are created from the develop branch. For example, say version 1.1.5 is the current production release and we have a big release coming up. The state of develop is ready for the “next release” and we have decided that this will become version 1.2 (rather than 1.1.6 or 2.0). So we branch off and give the release branch a name reflecting the new version number:

$ git checkout -b release-1.2 develop
Switched to a new branch "release-1.2"
$ ./bump-version.sh 1.2
Files modified successfully, version bumped to 1.2.
$ git commit -a -m "Bumped version number to 1.2"
[release-1.2 74d9424] Bumped version number to 1.2
1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)

After creating a new branch and switching to it, we bump the version number. Here, bump-version.sh is a fictional shell script that changes some files in the working copy to reflect the new version. (This can of course be a manual change—the point being that some files change.) Then, the bumped version number is committed.

This new branch may exist there for a while, until the release may be rolled out definitely. During that time, bug fixes may be applied in this branch (rather than on the develop branch). Adding large new features here is strictly prohibited. They must be merged into develop, and therefore, wait for the next big release.

Finishing a release branch

When the state of the release branch is ready to become a real release, some actions need to be carried out. First, the release branch is merged into master (since every commit on master is a new release by definition, remember). Next, that commit on master must be tagged for easy future reference to this historical version. Finally, the changes made on the release branch need to be merged back into develop, so that future releases also contain these bug fixes.

The first two steps in Git:

$ git checkout master
Switched to branch 'master'
$ git merge --no-ff release-1.2
Merge made by recursive.
(Summary of changes)
$ git tag -a 1.2

The release is now done, and tagged for future reference.

Edit: You might as well want to use the -s or -u <key> flags to sign your tag cryptographically.

To keep the changes made in the release branch, we need to merge those back into develop, though. In Git:

$ git checkout develop
Switched to branch 'develop'
$ git merge --no-ff release-1.2
Merge made by recursive.
(Summary of changes)

This step may well lead to a merge conflict (probably even, since we have changed the version number). If so, fix it and commit.

Now we are really done and the release branch may be removed, since we don’t need it anymore:

$ git branch -d release-1.2
Deleted branch release-1.2 (was ff452fe).

Hotfix branches

• May branch off from:

  master

• Must merge back into:

  develop and master

• Branch naming convention:

  hotfix-*

Hotfix branches are very much like release branches in that they are also meant to prepare for a new production release, albeit unplanned. They arise from the necessity to act immediately upon an undesired state of a live production version. When a critical bug in a production version must be resolved immediately, a hotfix branch may be branched off from the corresponding tag on the master branch that marks the production version.

The essence is that work of team members (on the develop branch) can continue, while another person is preparing a quick production fix.

Creating the hotfix branch

Hotfix branches are created from the master branch. For example, say version 1.2 is the current production release running live and causing troubles due to a severe bug. But changes on develop are yet unstable. We may then branch off a hotfix branch and start fixing the problem:

$ git checkout -b hotfix-1.2.1 master
Switched to a new branch "hotfix-1.2.1"
$ ./bump-version.sh 1.2.1
Files modified successfully, version bumped to 1.2.1.
$ git commit -a -m "Bumped version number to 1.2.1"
[hotfix-1.2.1 41e61bb] Bumped version number to 1.2.1
1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)

Don’t forget to bump the version number after branching off!

Then, fix the bug and commit the fix in one or more separate commits.

$ git commit -m "Fixed severe production problem"
[hotfix-1.2.1 abbe5d6] Fixed severe production problem
5 files changed, 32 insertions(+), 17 deletions(-)

Finishing a hotfix branch

When finished, the bugfix needs to be merged back into master, but also needs to be merged back into develop, in order to safeguard that the bugfix is included in the next release as well. This is completely similar to how release branches are finished.

First, update master and tag the release.

$ git checkout master
Switched to branch 'master'
$ git merge --no-ff hotfix-1.2.1
Merge made by recursive.
(Summary of changes)
$ git tag -a 1.2.1

Edit: You might as well want to use the -s or -u <key> flags to sign your tag cryptographically.

Next, include the bugfix in develop, too:

$ git checkout develop
Switched to branch 'develop'
$ git merge --no-ff hotfix-1.2.1
Merge made by recursive.
(Summary of changes)

The one exception to the rule here is that, when a release branch currently exists, the hotfix changes need to be merged into that release branch, instead of develop. Back-merging the bugfix into the release branch will eventually result in the bugfix being merged into develop too, when the release branch is finished. (If work in develop immediately requires this bugfix and cannot wait for the release branch to be finished, you may safely merge the bugfix into develop now already as well.)

Finally, remove the temporary branch:

$ git branch -d hotfix-1.2.1
Deleted branch hotfix-1.2.1 (was abbe5d6).

Summary

While there is nothing really shocking new to this branching model, the “big picture” figure that this post began with has turned out to be tremendously useful in our projects. It forms an elegant mental model that is easy to comprehend and allows team members to develop a shared understanding of the branching and releasing processes.

A high-quality PDF version of the figure is provided here. Go ahead and hang it on the wall for quick reference at any time.

Update: And for anyone who requested it: here’s the gitflow-model.src.key of the main diagram image (Apple Keynote).

files/Git-branching-model.pdf)

 

https://nvie.com/files/Git-branching-model.pdf

 

https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/quickstart/github-flow

Gitflow – simply git collaboratoin

Introduction

GitHub flow is a lightweight, branch-based workflow. The GitHub flow is useful for everyone, not just developers. For example, here at GitHub, we use GitHub flow for our site policy, documentation, and roadmap.

Prerequisites

To follow GitHub flow, you will need a GitHub account and a repository. For information on how to create an account, see "Creating an account on GitHub." For information on how to create a repository, see "Create a repo." For information on how to find an existing repository to contribute to, see "Finding ways to contribute to open source on GitHub."

Following GitHub flow

Tip: You can complete all steps of GitHub flow through the GitHub web interface, command line and GitHub CLI, or GitHub Desktop. For more information about the tools you can use to connect to GitHub, see "Connecting to GitHub."

Create a branch

Create a branch in your repository. A short, descriptive branch name enables your collaborators to see ongoing work at a glance. For example, increase-test-timeout or add-code-of-conduct. For more information, see "Creating and deleting branches within your repository."

By creating a branch, you create a space to work without affecting the default branch. Additionally, you give collaborators a chance to review your work.

Make changes

On your branch, make any desired changes to the repository. For more information, see "Creating new files", "Editing files", "Renaming a file", "Moving a file to a new location", or "Deleting files in a repository".

Your branch is a safe place to make changes. If you make a mistake, you can revert your changes or push additional changes to fix the mistake. Your changes will not end up on the default branch until you merge your branch.

Commit and push your changes to your branch. Give each commit a descriptive message to help you and future contributors understand what changes the commit contains. For example, fix typo or increase rate limit.

Ideally, each commit contains an isolated, complete change. This makes it easy to revert your changes if you decide to take a different approach. For example, if you want to rename a variable and add some tests, put the variable rename in one commit and the tests in another commit. Later, if you want to keep the tests but revert the variable rename, you can revert the specific commit that contained the variable rename. If you put the variable rename and tests in the same commit or spread the variable rename across multiple commits, you would spend more effort reverting your changes.

By committing and pushing your changes, you back up your work to remote storage. This means that you can access your work from any device. It also means that your collaborators can see your work, answer questions, and make suggestions or contributions.

Continue to make, commit, and push changes to your branch until you are ready to ask for feedback.

Tip: Make a separate branch for each set of unrelated changes. This makes it easier for reviewers to give feedback. It also makes it easier for you and future collaborators to understand the changes and to revert or build on them. Additionally, if there is a delay in one set of changes, your other changes aren't also delayed.

Create a pull request

Create a pull request to ask collaborators for feedback on your changes. Pull request review is so valuable that some repositories require an approving review before pull requests can be merged. If you want early feedback or advice before you complete your changes, you can mark your pull request as a draft. For more information, see "Creating a pull request."

When you create a pull request, include a summary of the changes and what problem they solve. You can include images, links, and tables to help convey this information. If your pull request addresses an issue, link the issue so that issue stakeholders are aware of the pull request and vice versa. If you link with a keyword, the issue will close automatically when the pull request merges. For more information, see "Basic writing and formatting syntax" and "Linking a pull request to an issue."

In addition to filling out the body of the pull request, you can add comments to specific lines of the pull request to explicitly point something out to the reviewers.

Your repository may be configured to automatically request a review from specific teams or users when a pull request is created. You can also manually @mention or request a review from specific people or teams.

If your repository has checks configured to run on pull requests, you will see any checks that failed on your pull request. This helps you catch errors before merging your branch. For more information, see "About status checks."

Address review comments

Reviewers should leave questions, comments, and suggestions. Reviewers can comment on the whole pull request or add comments to specific lines or files. You and reviewers can insert images or code suggestions to clarify comments. For more information, see "Reviewing changes in pull requests."

You can continue to commit and push changes in response to the reviews. Your pull request will update automatically.

Merge your pull request

Once your pull request is approved, merge your pull request. This will automatically merge your branch so that your changes appear on the default branch. GitHub retains the history of comments and commits in the pull request to help future contributors understand your changes. For more information, see "Merging a pull request."

GitHub will tell you if your pull request has conflicts that must be resolved before merging. For more information, see "Addressing merge conflicts."

Branch protection settings may block merging if your pull request does not meet certain requirements. For example, you need a certain number of approving reviews or an approving review from a specific team. For more information, see "About protected branches."

Delete your branch

After you merge your pull request, delete your branch. This indicates that the work on the branch is complete and prevents you or others from accidentally using old branches. For more information, see "Deleting and restoring branches in a pull request."

Don't worry about losing information. Your pull request and commit history will not be deleted. You can always restore your deleted branch or revert your pull request if needed.

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