Multi-Branch Flow

This workflow works well with 2-5 people when you want to maintain different environments.

With this workflow we will be dealing with two permanent branches: main and develop along with feature branches.

Start your day

• Start on the develop branch

git checkout develop
git pull origin develop

Create a feature branch

Branch off develop

git checkout develop
git checkout -b feature/my-branch

feature/my-branch is the name of your feature branch. It can be named anything, but here are common naming examples:

• feature/add-homepage
• bugfix/fix-login-error
• chore/organize-files
• docs/document-setup

Work on your feature

• Make changes locally
• Stage and commit

git add .
git commit -m "add a commmit message here"

Keep your feature branch up-to-date (optional)

If you are working with others it is a good idea to merge develop back into your feature branch to keep your feature branch up to date with changes others have made.

git checkout develop
git pull origin develop
git checkout feature/my-branch
git merge develop

If merge conflicts appear you will need to resolve them.

Push your feature branch

When you are ready to bring your feature branch into develop push your feature branch to your git host.

git push origin feature/my-branch

Open a pull request (PR) into develop

1. Log into your git host
2. Opean a PR to merge your feature branch into develop
3. Request review from teammates if needed
4. After approval, merge into develop
5. After merge is complete you can delete your feature branch from your git host

develop can be used as an integration branch to test everyone’s changes together. You can also use it to deploy to a “dev” or “staging” environment where you can test changes before merging to main and going to production.

Merge develop into main for production

Once develop is stable and tested, merge into main

1. Log into your git host
2. Create a PR from develop into main
3. Request review and approval if needed
4. When approved merge the PR
5. Do not delete develop after the merge. develop should remain as your integration branch.

Clean up

After your feature branch is merged into develop you can delete it.

git checkout develop
git pull origin develop
git branch -d feature/my-branch

If you did not delete your branch after you merged the PR on your git host you can delete it with:

git push origin --delete feature/my-branch

Hotfixes

Sometimes you need to fix something in production immediately. For these cases you can branch off main, creating a feature branch (i.e. hotfix/fix-typo) and then create PRs to merge the hotfix branch back into main and develop.