DevOps

Git for Professionals

- File staging helps in better commits, (easier to manage, review code and adding commit messages).

Driptanil DattaSoftware Developer

Mar 202510 min read

Git for Professionals

Perfect Git Commit

• File staging helps in better commits, (easier to manage, review code and adding commit messages).

• Use git diff <file>, to view the changes made to the not staged file.

• Use git -p to stage certain chucks of changes in a file.

• 

  • y -> stage hunk
  • n -> do not stage hunk
  • a -> stage all remaining hunks
  • d -> do not stage any remaining hunks
  • s -> split the current hunk
  • e -> manually edit the current hunk

• Use git commit to open a text editor (default: vi editor, or use git config --global core.editor <editor_name>)

• Format for commit message:

  1. 1st line: Subject
  2. 2nd line: <blank>
  3. 3rd line: Body a. What is now different than before? b. What is the reason for the change? c. Is there anything to watch out for / anything particularly remarkable

Branching Strategies

Convention:

(agree on a Branching Work-flow in a team)

1. Git allows users to create branches - learning it for better usage would improve the work-flow
2. A written best practice / strategy to ideally structure work in between team members
3. Team members, team size and type of project plays a huge role in managing project releases.
4. Helping new on-board team members to understand the work-flow to reduce conflicts

Integrating Changes & Structuring Releases

Mainline Development

(always be integrating)

-> few branches -> relatively small commit -> high-quality testing & QA standards

State, Release, and Feature Branches

(Branches Enhance Structures & Workflows)

-> different types of branches -> fulfil different types of jobs

Long-Running & Short-Lived Branches

Long Running Branches

• Long Running Branches are the branches which exist through out the project.
• Every Git repository has a long running branches like main or master branch.
• Some repositories have develop or staging long running branches, generally for stability testing before merging to master branch.
• These branches represent the different stages of release and deployment.
• Commit are not directly made to long-running branches.

Short Lived Branches

• They are created for certain purposed (like new features, bug fixes, refactoring).
• They are deleted after being merged or rebased to the long running branch.
• A short lived branch is based on a long running branch.

Git Workflows

GitHub Flow

• It consists of only 1 long running branch (main) and working changes are made in short lived branches.

Git-Flow

• It consists of 2 long running branches (main + develop) and short lived branches (feature, release, hotfixes).

Develop Branch

• The develop branch serves as an integration branch of feature.

Creating develop branch

• Using git, git branch develop & git push -u origin develop
• Using git-flow extension, git flow init

Feature Branch

• The feature branch uses develop as their parent branch and feature never directly interacts with main.

Creating feature branch

• Using git, git checkout develop & git checkout -b feature_branch
• Using git-flow extension, git flow feature start feature_branch

Merging feature to develop

• Using git, git checkout develop & git merge feature_branch
• Using git-flow, git flow feature finish feature_branch

Release Branch

• After develop branch has acquired enough features for a release.
• A release branch is branched off develop branch.
• Documentations, bug fixes, and release-oriented tasks of new features are pushed to release branch.
• Using git, git checkout develop & git checkout -b release/<version>.
• Using git flow extension, git flow release start <version>.
• Once release branch is ready, it is merged to main branch.
• release branch is merged back to develop branch and release branch is deleted
• Using git, git checkout main & git merge release/<version>
• Using git flow extension, git flow release finish <version>

Hotfix Branch

• The hotfix branched off main branch, for quick patch production releases.
• As soon as the fix is complete, it is merged into main & develop branch.
• A dedicated branch for bug fixes, helps team to address issues and speed up the release cycle.
  • Using git, git checkout main & git checkout -b hotfix_branch.
  • Using git flow extension git flow hotfix start hotfix_branch.

Pull Requests

• Pull request is request to merge changes to other repositories (pushing changes are not allowed).
• It gets many developers involved for reviewing the code and fix bugs (if any) before merging it to main branch.

Fork Repository

• Fork creates a copy of a repository with administrator permissions, to which we are allowed to make changes.