How to use Git effectively

This is a high-level overview of Vincent Driessen’s branching model, usually called GitFlow. Each branch has a job, which helps answer the question “Where does this change belong?” before everyone develops their own answer.

Branches

Master

master is meant to be production ready. It’s the branch a new team member can build to get familiar with the baseline. Ideally, this branch is never broken. “Welcome aboard; the build is broken” is a rough introduction.

Develop

develop is where development starts. Feature and release branches branch off it, which is why it’s sometimes called the integration branch.

This is a good place to run your nightly build within your Continuous Integration environment.

Feature

A feature/<issue_number or description> or feature-<issue_number or description> branch isolates a feature’s changes so a developer has a consistent baseline to work with. It’s common practice to merge develop into your feature branch often to check that your work still fits with the other changes. The feature branch starts from develop and merges back into develop when the work is complete.

This is a good place to run builds on each push within your Continuous Integration environment.

Release

A release/<version> or release-<version> branch gives you a place to prepare a release: bump the version and make other release-related code changes. This is also where the test team starts preliminary testing, so issues can be caught before the release is official. The release branch starts from develop and merges into master. Then master is merged back into develop.