Why branching

But this only leaves you with other problems:. To make a long story short: if your goal is to work professionally, you'll have to find a way to deal with multiple contexts in a professional manner. You might have already guessed it: branches are what we need to solve these problems. Because a branch represents exactly such a context in a project and helps you keep it separate from all other contexts. Continue reading in our free online book to understand How branches can solve these problems , How to create and manage them , How to integrate changes between branches and where remote branches come into play.

Now, let's look at why branches are so important. Working in Contexts In every project, there are always multiple different contexts where work happens. Besides, you also update some content on your FAQ pages context 4 , while A World Without Branches Not working in clearly separated contexts can and sooner or later will cause several problems: What happens if your client likes variation 2 of the new design?

In the meantime, a host of other changes have happened! Resources Resources. Import now. Sign In Sign up for free Sign up for free. Allie Dyer Bluemel Community Contributor. Enjoy your work. Project management software should be helpful, not a hassle. Get started—free forever Sign up with Google. The two major branching strategies—and how to decide which is right for you While some teams choose to create more bespoke branching strategies, two branching strategies are widely recognized as industry standards.

Start With Shortcut Today! The comprehensiveness of GitFlow gives it several pros, especially for larger development teams. GitHub Flow centers on Agile principles, making it a fast and streamlined branching strategy. Give us a whirl. Because you shouldn't have to project manage your project management.

Start a free trial Sign up with Google. Share this Shortcut story. More stories from Shortcut. It lies on the opposite end of the spectrum, being a more heavy-weight process. So, how does GitFlow work? In short, GitFlow relies on two long-lived branches and some short-lived ones.

The permanent ones are good old controller and the new kid on the block, "development. This is the branch where, well, development happens. And how does it happen?

By the use of the supporting branches, which can fall into one of the three following categories:. Feature branches are the ones developers create to work on new features. They should always branch off "development. The next type of supporting branch is the release branch. These branches allow for preparation of a new release. And besides that, they enable the developer to perform minor bug fixes and to prepare metadata for the release.

Since this work is being done in a separate branch, the development branch is free to receive features intended for the next release. When the release branch gets stable enough to become a release, it should be merged into controller. Then, the commit on controller should be tagged, with the correct version numbers, so it can be easily accessed in the future. Finally, it's time to cover hotfix branches. Hotfix branches are also meant to prepare for a release in production. The difference, though, is that this time the release wasn't planned.

Instead, it's due to necessity: a critical bug in production that must be dealt with swiftly. The idea is that work on new features can continue as usual while, at the same time, someone is preparing a fix for the critical production problem. Hotfix branches should be created from controller since that branch reflects the last desirable state of the application in production. While the fix is done and ready to go, the branch should be merged to controller.

But don't just merge it to controller: it's also vital that it's merged to "develop" because the feature releases will need those corrections as well. Under the forking workflow, each developer has two Git repositories: a local one and a server-side one.

If you're used to contributing to open-source software projects, you're probably aware of this branching strategy. The forking workflow presents the benefit that developers' contributions can be integrated without the need for a single central repository.

Developers can push to their own server-side repositories. The project maintainer can then push to the official repository That way, the maintainer can accept commits from any developer but doesn't have to grant them write access to the official repository. To start working under the forking workflow, a developer would typically fork the "true" repository in order to create a copy of it on the server.

This copy serves as their personal public repository—no one can push to it, but they can pull changes from it. After their server-side copy is created, the developer can then perform "Git clone" to get a local copy of their online copy of the original repository. Then, they submit a pull request to the repository, which lets the project maintainer know that an update is coming their way.

The pull request can also serve as discussion thread if there are problems with the contributed code. Git is a flexible yet powerful tool. It allows developers to work using a vast variety of workflows and strategies.

But it's not always easy to navigate all of the available options, particularly for beginners at Git. So, given all these options, which branching strategy should you pick for your team and your project? Well, it's not possible to give a correct one-size-fits-all answer, so I'm not even going to try. You may be interested in checking out the following article, which explains the principles of branching, and when to use them: Ned Batchelder - Subversion branching quick start.

Daniel Vassallo Daniel Vassallo k 70 70 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. I never heard or thought of the common use you mentioned but that is a really cool idea. I really might use this in the upcoming project. Thanks for pointing it out. All the 21th century SCMs are telling you: Branch for every task you've to work on, no matter whether this is a new feature, a bugfix, a test, whatever.

Tasks are independent normally starting from a stable baseline, so you only focus on your code, not on fixing bugs from your folks , and you can choose whether you want to integrate them at some point or later, but they're always under version control You can review code easily from the version control, not pre-commit bullshit before hitting the main line Tools that can do it: Git Mercurial Plastic SCM Tools that CAN'T do it: SVN CVS VSS TFS Perforce.

Vadim Kotov 7, 8 8 gold badges 45 45 silver badges 60 60 bronze badges. Why you can't do it with SVN?? SVN is not good merging. Due to lack of proper merge tracking.

Also because creating a branch is not as cheap as in the ones I pointed, it ends up being a nightmare under real conditions. Better traceability: Why would you want to commit as many times as you want? Isn't once per task enough when the task isn't a complicated feature? Also bugs from folks can easily make their ways to the main branch and make it not "stable" and not "safe", right at the moment when they merge. PaimanSamadian: "Isn't once per task enough when the task isn't a complicated feature?

By the same token, when the task is complicated, one commit isn't enough I commit every few minutes if things are going well. Why force one commit per task? Part of the point of a feature branch workflow is that it makes code review and testing possible before the code is merged into the main branch. PaimanSamadian multiple checkins are great to explain intermediate changes and ease review.

Also, if you are working a few hours on something, multiple checkins are great. Fred Fred 1, 1 1 gold badge 11 11 silver badges 10 10 bronze badges. Dominic Rodger Dominic Rodger It depends on what type of SCM you're using. Lester Cheung Lester Cheung 1, 14 14 silver badges 17 17 bronze badges. P4 peoplee used to say this, but nowadays their marketing is telling something different.

They tried to avoid branching for years, simply because they can't do task or topic branches as good as other systems out there like Git — pablo. Response in ! As others have mentioned - branching is implied in DVCS and the question becomes irreverent.

I reckon the discussion should be limited to only tools that works in the client-server fashion.