Basics Usage

This is the main thing to remember about Git if you want the rest of your learning process to go smoothly. Git has three main states that your files can reside in: committed, modified, and staged. Committed means that the data is safely stored in your local database. Modified means that you have changed the file but have not committed it to your database yet. Staged means that you have marked a modified file in its current version to go into your next commit snapshot.

This leads us to the three main sections of a Git project: the Git directory, the working tree, and the staging area.

The Git directory is where Git stores the metadata and object database for your project. This is the most important part of Git, and it is what is copied when you clone a repository from another computer.

The working tree is a single checkout of one version of the project. These files are pulled out of the compressed database in the Git directory and placed on disk for you to use or modify.

The staging area is a file, generally contained in your Git directory that stores information about what will go into your next commit. It’s sometimes referred to as the “index”, but it’s also common to refer to it as the staging area.

The basic Git workflow goes something like this:

You modify files in your working tree.
You stage the files, adding snapshots of them to your staging area.
You do a commit, which takes the files as they are in the staging area and stores that snapshot permanently to your Git directory.

If a particular version of a file is in the Git directory, it’s considered committed. If it has been modified and was added to the staging area, it is staged. And if it was changed since it was checked out but has not been staged, it is modified. In Git Basics, you’ll learn more about these states and how you can either take advantage of them or skip the staged part entirely.

Your Identity

The first thing you should do when you install Git is to set your user name and email address. This is important because every Git commit uses this information, and it’s immutably baked into the commits you start creating:

$ git config --global user.name "John Doe"
$ git config --global user.email [email protected]

Again, you need to do this only once if you pass the --global option, because then Git will always use that information for anything you do on that system. If you want to override this with a different name or email address for specific projects, you can run the command without the --global option when you’re in that project.

Many of the GUI tools will help you do this when you first run them.

Your Editor

Now that your identity is set up, you can configure the default text editor that will be used when Git needs you to type in a message. If not configured, Git uses your system’s default editor.

If you want to use a different text editor, such as vim, you can do the following:

$ git config --global core.editor vim

Getting a Git Repository

You can get a Git project using two main approaches. The first takes an existing project or directory and imports it into Git. The second clones an existing Git repository from another server.

Initializing a Repository in an Existing Directory

If you’re starting to track an existing project in Git, you need to go to the project’s directory. If you’ve never done this, it looks a little different depending on which system you’re running:

$ cd /home/user/your_repository

and type:

$ git init

This creates a new subdirectory named .git that contains all of your necessary repository files – a Git repository skeleton. At this point, nothing in your project is tracked yet. (See Git Internals for more information about exactly what files are contained in the .git directory you just created.)

If you want to start version-controlling existing files (as opposed to an empty directory), you should probably begin tracking those files and do an initial commit. You can accomplish that with a few git add commands that specify the files you want to track, followed by a git commit:

$ git add *.c
$ git add LICENSE
$ git commit -m 'initial project version'

We’ll go over what these commands do in just a minute. At this point, you have a Git repository with tracked files and an initial commit.

Cloning an Existing Repository

If you want to get a copy of an existing Git repository – for example, a project you’d like to contribute to – the command you need is git clone. If you’re familiar with other VCS systems such as Subversion, you’ll notice that the command is “clone” and not “checkout”. This is an important distinction – instead of getting just a working copy, Git receives a full copy of nearly all data that the server has. Every version of every file for the history of the project is pulled down by default when you run git clone. In fact, if your server disk gets corrupted, you can often use nearly any of the clones on any client to set the server back to the state it was in when it was cloned (you may lose some server-side hooks and such, but all the versioned data would be there – see Git on the Server for more details).

You clone a repository with git clone [url]. For example, if you want to clone the Git linkable library called libgit2, you can do so like this:

$ git clone https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2

That creates a directory named “libgit2”, initializes a .git directory inside it, pulls down all the data for that repository, and checks out a working copy of the latest version. If you go into the new libgit2 directory, you’ll see the project files in there, ready to be worked on or used. If you want to clone the repository into a directory named something other than “libgit2”, you can specify that as the next command-line option:

$ git clone https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2 mylibgit

That command does the same thing as the previous one, but the target directory is called mylibgit.

Git has a number of different transfer protocols you can use. The previous example uses the https:// protocol, but you may also see git:// or user@server:path/to/repo.git, which uses the SSH transfer protocol. Git on the Server will introduce all of the available options the server can set up to access your Git repository and the pros and cons of each.

Recording Changes to the Repository

You have a bona fide Git repository and a checkout or working copy of the files for that project. You need to make some changes and commit snapshots of those changes into your repository each time the project reaches a state you want to record.

Remember that each file in your working directory can be in one of two states: tracked or untracked. Tracked files are files that were in the last snapshot; they can be unmodified, modified, or staged. Untracked files are everything else – any files in your working directory that were not in your last snapshot and are not in your staging area. When you first clone a repository, all of your files will be tracked and unmodified because Git just checked them out and you haven’t edited anything.

As you edit files, Git sees them as modified, because you’ve changed them since your last commit. You stage these modified files and then commit all your staged changes, and the cycle repeats.

The lifecycle of the status of your files.

Checking the Status of Your Files

The main tool you use to determine which files are in which state is the git status command. If you run this command directly after a clone, you should see something like this:

$ git status
On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
nothing to commit, working directory clean

This means you have a clean working directory – in other words, none of your tracked files are modified. Git also doesn’t see any untracked files, or they would be listed here. Finally, the command tells you which branch you’re on and informs you that it has not diverged from the same branch on the server. For now, that branch is always “master”, which is the default; you won’t worry about it here. Git Branching will go over branches and references in detail.

Let’s say you add a new file to your project, a simple README file. If the file didn’t exist before, and you run git status, you see your untracked file like so:

$ echo 'My Project' > README
$ git status
On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
Untracked files:
(use "git add <file>..." to include in what will be committed)
README
nothing added to commit but untracked files present (use "git add" to track)

You can see that your new README file is untracked, because it’s under the “Untracked files” heading in your status output. Untracked basically means that Git sees a file you didn’t have in the previous snapshot (commit); Git won’t start including it in your commit snapshots until you explicitly tell it to do so. It does this so you don’t accidentally begin including generated binary files or other files that you did not mean to include. You do want to start including README, so let’s start tracking the file.

Tracking New Files

In order to begin tracking a new file, you use the command git add. To begin tracking the README file, you can run this:

$ git add README

If you run your status command again, you can see that your README file is now tracked and staged to be committed:

$ git status
On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
Changes to be committed:
(use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)
new file:   README

You can tell that it’s staged because it’s under the “Changes to be committed” heading. If you commit at this point, the version of the file at the time you ran git add is what will be in the historical snapshot. You may recall that when you ran git init earlier, you then ran git add (files) – that was to begin tracking files in your directory. The git add command takes a path name for either a file or a directory; if it’s a directory, the command adds all the files in that directory recursively.

Staging Modified Files

Let’s change a file that was already tracked. If you change a previously tracked file called CONTRIBUTING.md and then run your git status command again, you get something that looks like this:

$ git status
On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
Changes to be committed:
(use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)
new file:   README
Changes not staged for commit:
(use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
(use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
modified:   CONTRIBUTING.md

The CONTRIBUTING.md file appears under a section named “Changes not staged for commit” – which means that a file that is tracked has been modified in the working directory but not yet staged. To stage it, you run the git add command. git add is a multipurpose command – you use it to begin tracking new files, to stage files, and to do other things like marking merge-conflicted files as resolved. It may be helpful to think of it more as “add this content to the next commit” rather than “add this file to the project”. Let’s run git add now to stage the CONTRIBUTING.md file, and then run git status again:

$ git add CONTRIBUTING.md
$ git status
On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
Changes to be committed:
(use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)
new file:   README
modified:   CONTRIBUTING.md

Both files are staged and will go into your next commit. At this point, suppose you remember one little change that you want to make in CONTRIBUTING.md before you commit it. You open it again and make that change, and you’re ready to commit. However, let’s run git status one more time:

$ vim CONTRIBUTING.md
$ git status
On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
Changes to be committed:
(use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)
new file:   README
modified:   CONTRIBUTING.md
Changes not staged for commit:
(use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
(use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
modified:   CONTRIBUTING.md

What the heck? Now CONTRIBUTING.md is listed as both staged and unstaged. How is that possible? It turns out that Git stages a file exactly as it is when you run the git add command. If you commit now, the version of CONTRIBUTING.md as it was when you last ran the git add command is how it will go into the commit, not the version of the file as it looks in your working directory when you run git commit. If you modify a file after you run git add, you have to run git add again to stage the latest version of the file:

$ git add CONTRIBUTING.md
$ git status
On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
Changes to be committed:
(use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)
new file:   README
modified:   CONTRIBUTING.md

Short Status

While the git status output is pretty comprehensive, it’s also quite wordy. Git also has a short status flag so you can see your changes in a more compact way. If you run git status -s or git status –short you get a far more simplified output from the command:

$ git status -s
M README
MM Rakefile
A  lib/git.rb
M  lib/simplegit.rb
?? LICENSE.txt

New files that aren’t tracked have a ?? next to them, new files that have been added to the staging area have an A, modified files have an M and so on. There are two columns to the output – the left-hand column indicates the status of the staging area and the right-hand column indicates the status of the working tree. So for example in that output, the README file is modified in the working directory but not yet staged, while the lib/simplegit.rb file is modified and staged. The Rakefile was modified, staged and then modified again, so there are changes to it that are both staged and unstaged.

Ignoring Files

Often, you’ll have a class of files that you don’t want Git to automatically add or even show you as being untracked. These are generally automatically generated files such as log files or files produced by your build system. In such cases, you can create a file listing patterns to match them named .gitignore. Here is an example .gitignore file:

$ cat .gitignore
*.[oa]
*~

The first line tells Git to ignore any files ending in “.o” or “.a” – object and archive files that may be the product of building your code. The second line tells Git to ignore all files whose names end with a tilde (~), which is used by many text editors such as Emacs to mark temporary files. You may also include a log, tmp, or pid directory; automatically generated documentation; and so on. Setting up a .gitignore file before you get going is generally a good idea so you don’t accidentally commit files that you really don’t want in your Git repository.

The rules for the patterns you can put in the .gitignore file are as follows:

Blank lines or lines starting with # are ignored.
Standard glob patterns work.
You can start patterns with a forward slash (/) to avoid recursivity.
You can end patterns with a forward slash (/) to specify a directory.
You can negate a pattern by starting it with an exclamation point (!).

Glob patterns are like simplified regular expressions that shells use. An asterisk (*) matches zero or more characters; [abc] matches any character inside the brackets (in this case a, b, or c); a question mark (?) matches a single character; and brackets enclosing characters separated by a hyphen ([0-9]) matches any character between them (in this case 0 through 9). You can also use two asterisks to match nested directories; a/**/z would match a/z, a/b/z, a/b/c/z, and so on.

Here is another example .gitignore file:

# no .a files
*.a
# but do track lib.a, even though you're ignoring .a files above
!lib.a
# only ignore the TODO file in the current directory, not subdir/TODO
/TODO
# ignore all files in the build/ directory
build/
# ignore doc/notes.txt, but not doc/server/arch.txt
doc/*.txt
# ignore all .pdf files in the doc/ directory
doc/**/*.pdf

Tip

GitHub maintains a fairly comprehensive list of good .gitignore file examples for dozens of projects and languages at https://github.com/github/gitignore if you want a starting point for your project.

Viewing Your Staged and Unstaged Changes

If the git status command is too vague for you – you want to know exactly what you changed, not just which files were changed – you can use the git diff command. We’ll cover git diff in more detail later, but you’ll probably use it most often to answer these two questions: What have you changed but not yet staged? And what have you staged that you are about to commit? Although git status answers those questions very generally by listing the file names, git diff shows you the exact lines added and removed – the patch, as it were.

Let’s say you edit and stage the README file again and then edit the CONTRIBUTING.md file without staging it. If you run your git status command, you once again see something like this:

$ git status
On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
Changes to be committed:
(use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)
modified:   README
Changes not staged for commit:
(use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
(use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
modified:   CONTRIBUTING.md

To see what you’ve changed but not yet staged, type git diff with no other arguments:

$ git diff
diff --git a/CONTRIBUTING.md b/CONTRIBUTING.md
index 8ebb991..643e24f 100644
--- a/CONTRIBUTING.md
+++ b/CONTRIBUTING.md
@@ -65,7 +65,8 @@ branch directly, things can get messy.

Please include a nice description of your changes when you submit your PR;

if we have to read the whole diff to figure out why you’re contributing

in the first place, you’re less likely to get feedback and have your change

-merged in.

+merged in. Also, split your changes into comprehensive chunks if your patch is

+longer than a dozen lines.

If you are starting to work on a particular area, feel free to submit a PR that highlights your work in progress (and note in the PR title that it’s…

That command compares what is in your working directory with what is in your staging area. The result tells you the changes you’ve made that you haven’t yet staged.

If you want to see what you’ve staged that will go into your next commit, you can use git diff –staged. This command compares your staged changes to your last commit:

$ git diff --staged
diff --git a/README b/README
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..03902a1
--- /dev/null
+++ b/README
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+My Project

It’s important to note that git diff by itself doesn’t show all changes made since your last commit – only changes that are still unstaged. This can be confusing, because if you’ve staged all of your changes, git diff will give you no output.

For another example, if you stage the CONTRIBUTING.md file and then edit it, you can use git diff to see the changes in the file that are staged and the changes that are unstaged. If our environment looks like this:

$ git add CONTRIBUTING.md
$ echo '# test line' >> CONTRIBUTING.md
$ git status
On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
Changes to be committed:
(use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)
modified:   CONTRIBUTING.md
Changes not staged for commit:
(use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
(use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
modified:   CONTRIBUTING.md

Now you can use git diff to see what is still unstaged:

$ git diff
diff --git a/CONTRIBUTING.md b/CONTRIBUTING.md
index 643e24f..87f08c8 100644
--- a/CONTRIBUTING.md
+++ b/CONTRIBUTING.md
@@ -119,3 +119,4 @@ at the
## Starter Projects
See our [projects list](https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2/blob/development/PROJECTS.md).
+# test line
and git diff --cached to see what you’ve staged so far (--staged and --cached are synonyms):
$ git diff --cached
diff --git a/CONTRIBUTING.md b/CONTRIBUTING.md
index 8ebb991..643e24f 100644
--- a/CONTRIBUTING.md
+++ b/CONTRIBUTING.md
@@ -65,7 +65,8 @@ branch directly, things can get messy.

Please include a nice description of your changes when you submit your PR;

if we have to read the whole diff to figure out why you’re contributing

in the first place, you’re less likely to get feedback and have your change

-merged in.

+merged in. Also, split your changes into comprehensive chunks if your patch is

+longer than a dozen lines.

If you are starting to work on a particular area, feel free to submit a PR

that highlights your work in progress (and note in the PR title that it’s

Note

Git Diff in an External Tool

We will continue to use the git diff command in various ways throughout the rest of the book. There is another way to look at these diffs if you prefer a graphical or external diff viewing program instead. If you run git difftool instead of git diff, you can view any of these diffs in software like emerge, vimdiff and many more (including commercial products). Run git difftool –tool-help to see what is available on your system.

Committing Your Changes

Now that your staging area is set up the way you want it, you can commit your changes. Remember that anything that is still unstaged – any files you have created or modified that you haven’t run git add on since you edited them – won’t go into this commit. They will stay as modified files on your disk. In this case, let’s say that the last time you ran git status, you saw that everything was staged, so you’re ready to commit your changes. The simplest way to commit is to type git commit:

$ git commit

Doing so launches your editor of choice. (This is set by your shell’s $EDITOR environment variable – usually vim or emacs, although you can configure it with whatever you want using the git config –global core.editor command as you saw in Getting Started).

The editor displays the following text (this example is a Vim screen):

# Please enter the commit message for your changes. Lines starting
# with '#' will be ignored, and an empty message aborts the commit.
# On branch master
# Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
#
# Changes to be committed:
#     new file:   README
#     modified:   CONTRIBUTING.md
#
~
~
~
".git/COMMIT_EDITMSG" 9L, 283C

You can see that the default commit message contains the latest output of the git status command commented out and one empty line on top. You can remove these comments and type your commit message, or you can leave them there to help you remember what you’re committing. (For an even more explicit reminder of what you’ve modified, you can pass the -v option to git commit. Doing so also puts the diff of your change in the editor so you can see exactly what changes you’re committing.) When you exit the editor, Git creates your commit with that commit message (with the comments and diff stripped out).

Alternatively, you can type your commit message inline with the commit command by specifying it after a -m flag, like this:

$ git commit -m "Story 182: Fix benchmarks for speed"
[master 463dc4f] Story 182: Fix benchmarks for speed
2 files changed, 2 insertions(+)
create mode 100644 README

Now you’ve created your first commit! You can see that the commit has given you some output about itself: which branch you committed to (master), what SHA-1 checksum the commit has (463dc4f), how many files were changed, and statistics about lines added and removed in the commit.

Remember that the commit records the snapshot you set up in your staging area. Anything you didn’t stage is still sitting there modified; you can do another commit to add it to your history. Every time you perform a commit, you’re recording a snapshot of your project that you can revert to or compare to later.

Skipping the Staging Area

Although it can be amazingly useful for crafting commits exactly how you want them, the staging area is sometimes a bit more complex than you need in your workflow. If you want to skip the staging area, Git provides a simple shortcut. Adding the -a option to the git commit command makes Git automatically stage every file that is already tracked before doing the commit, letting you skip the git add part:

$ git status
On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
Changes not staged for commit:
(use "git add <file>..." to update what will be committed)
(use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
modified:   CONTRIBUTING.md
no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")
$ git commit -a -m 'added new benchmarks'
[master 83e38c7] added new benchmarks
1 file changed, 5 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)

Notice how you don’t have to run git add on the CONTRIBUTING.md file in this case before you commit. That’s because the -a flag includes all changed files. This is convenient, but be careful; sometimes this flag will cause you to include unwanted changes.

Removing Files

To remove a file from Git, you have to remove it from your tracked files (more accurately, remove it from your staging area) and then commit. The git rm command does that, and also removes the file from your working directory so you don’t see it as an untracked file the next time around.

If you simply remove the file from your working directory, it shows up under the “Changed but not updated” (that is, unstaged) area of your git status output:

$ rm PROJECTS.md
$ git status
On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
Changes not staged for commit:
(use "git add/rm <file>..." to update what will be committed)
(use "git checkout -- <file>..." to discard changes in working directory)
deleted:    PROJECTS.md
no changes added to commit (use "git add" and/or "git commit -a")

Then, if you run git rm, it stages the file’s removal:

$ git rm PROJECTS.md
rm 'PROJECTS.md'
$ git status
On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
Changes to be committed:
(use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)
deleted:    PROJECTS.md

The next time you commit, the file will be gone and no longer tracked. If you modified the file and added it to the index already, you must force the removal with the -f option. This is a safety feature to prevent accidental removal of data that hasn’t yet been recorded in a snapshot and that can’t be recovered from Git.

Another useful thing you may want to do is to keep the file in your working tree but remove it from your staging area. In other words, you may want to keep the file on your hard drive but not have Git track it anymore. This is particularly useful if you forgot to add something to your .gitignore file and accidentally staged it, like a large log file or a bunch of .a compiled files. To do this, use the –cached option:

$ git rm --cached README

You can pass files, directories, and file-glob patterns to the git rm command. That means you can do things such as:

$ git rm log/\*.log

Note the backslash (\) in front of the *. This is necessary because Git does its own filename expansion in addition to your shell’s filename expansion. This command removes all files that have the .log extension in the log/ directory. Or, you can do something like this:

$ git rm \*~

This command removes all files whose names end with a ~.

Moving Files

Unlike many other VCS systems, Git doesn’t explicitly track file movement. If you rename a file in Git, no metadata is stored in Git that tells it you renamed the file. However, Git is pretty smart about figuring that out after the fact – we’ll deal with detecting file movement a bit later.

Thus it’s a bit confusing that Git has a mv command. If you want to rename a file in Git, you can run something like:

$ git mv file_from file_to

and it works fine. In fact, if you run something like this and look at the status, you’ll see that Git considers it a renamed file:

$ git mv README.md README
$ git status
On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
Changes to be committed:
(use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)
renamed:    README.md -> README
However, this is equivalent to running something like this:
$ mv README.md README
$ git rm README.md
$ git add README

Git figures out that it’s a rename implicitly, so it doesn’t matter if you rename a file that way or with the mv command. The only real difference is that git mv is one command instead of three – it’s a convenience function. More importantly, you can use any tool you like to rename a file, and address the add/rm later, before you commit.

Branches

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.

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 every time 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.

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

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, 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.

These ideas and most of the text comes from http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/ and https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/

Tom's Development Blog

Git Strategy

Basics Usage

Your Identity

Your Editor

Getting a Git Repository

Initializing a Repository in an Existing Directory

Cloning an Existing Repository

Recording Changes to the Repository

Checking the Status of Your Files

Tracking New Files

Staging Modified Files

Short Status

Ignoring Files

Viewing Your Staged and Unstaged Changes

Note

Committing Your Changes

Skipping the Staging Area

Removing Files

Moving Files

Branches

The main branches

Supporting branches

Feature branches

Creating a feature branch

Incorporating a finished feature on develop

Release branches

Creating a release branch

Finishing a release branch

Hotfix branches

Creating the hotfix branch

Finishing a hotfix branch

Summary