Making Gitflow the way you want it to
I have been a part-time Git user for a little over a year now. Before this, I had dabbled with using Subversion but never for anything too serious. I say ‘part-time’ because, throughout the year, I never fully got to grips with all the ideologies and tools available to support my development lifecycle process. This was particularly evident with regard to branching.
Sure, I had attempted to get my head around the excellent documentation found on the official Git website, along with a boatload of screencasts. However, putting this into practise never actually happened. Until recently, I had been very content working in ‘master’. On occasion, if I was feeling a little adventurous, I would add a temporary branch for an experimental feature.
Gitflow to the rescue
This has all changed since I discovered Gitflow (a little late to the party, I know). In 2010, Vincent Driessen posted on his site (A successful Git branching model) about how he used Git for both personal and professional development. He discussed incorporating the use of the branch types listed below:
- Master
- Hotfix
- Release
- Develop
- Feature
On top of this, he released a set of Git extensions to help speed up and ease the learning curve. If you are a Homebrew user like myself, installing Gitflow is as easy as running the following command:
$ brew install git-flow
To begin using Gitflow on an existing Git repository and create a new feature called ’test’, run the following commands:
$ git flow init
$ git flow feature start test
There is no point in me repeating the concepts presented in Vincent’s well-laid-out blog post, or adding yet another simple tutorial to the mix. Instead, I will leave you with a list of resources that I have found useful when learning this subject.