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I am trying to learn and develop best practices with git. I've been reading the git flow branching practice when it comes to branching. Based on this practice my branches should be

master
develop
hotfix
feature

I develop on my local machine using a local repo. I have two remote bare repos that I will push to. One is a TEST server and the second is the LIVE production server.Both of these remote repos have a post-receive hook in place.

The master branch is supposed to reserved for final production code only. So, wWhich branch do I push to the TEST server? Currently I have to merge the develop to the master and then push the local master to the TEST. But, if I have any editing after that push, the master has been changed and was not really ready for production. Should I be pushing the develop branch up to the TEST server? And, then after final approval merge develop to the master and then push the master to the LIVE server?

I don't why I'm so confused by this? I think I'm afraid of making any mistakes.

MAZUMA
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2 Answers2

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It's actually very simple, push whatever you need to be on the test server onto the test server. If your code is not ready to merge into master yet, then simply don't merge it yet, just push your develop branch and or your topic branches. There is no harm and in fact it's normal to have many branches on your bare repositories.

In fact if you have commit hooks there that are firing off continuous integration builds and tests, then you need all the branches that you are currently testing to be there.

Tim Jarvis
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  • How does the remote know which branch should be active so to speak? – MAZUMA Dec 11 '12 at 21:41
  • You seem to be under the impression that only 1 branch is active, this is usually not the case (especially for testing) typically you would have your CI software (TeamCity, Jenkins, Cruisecontrol...whatever) with build projects on all of the branches you are testing. That way you can have continuous integration on long running topic branches as well as your release branch(es) – Tim Jarvis Dec 11 '12 at 22:55
  • Yeah, I'm real new to this game. Currently though I'm just a single developer working on this site. It's a fairly large site built from the ground up. I'm using git to help me handle multiple development tracks. Is the CI software going to be beneficial to a lone developer or is there another solution here? – MAZUMA Dec 11 '12 at 23:10
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I have a similiar architecture: master, hotfix and develop.

Imagine that you have a new feature to develop. What are my steps:

Each new feature has a new branch: 

git checkout -b issue1234
<make some updates...>
git commit -a -m 'mensagem'
git push origin issue1234

You can merge with develop branch, just to see how it works with others developments and run test cases.

git checkout dev
git merge issue1234
git push

People make several tests, edit it and decide it's ready to deploy!

git checkout master
git merge issue1234
git push

Note that I never merge master with develop. Just features are merged.

I don't know if this is the best approach but I can always know which code has changed for each feature/issue made.

Josir
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  • Ok. I get the process you are describing. What I don't get is how do I view the new changes pushed to the develop branch on the remote from a browser. I use the remote server to host a duplicate of the site I'm developing. This is where I stage changes for clients to approve. If no changes I can merge the branch to master and then push to my LIVE server. If there are changes I can make those and push back to the remote. – MAZUMA Dec 11 '12 at 22:04