Practical Feature Branching
When I first started using git, I never used branches. My typical workflow was more or less:
git pull origin master- make some edits
git add .git push origin master
ad infinitum.
This workflow worked well for me until I started working with teams and larger clients with staging and production servers.
I remember one day I was working on a project with a git log like:
* e55c976 (HEAD, master) 1 day ago Jesse Shawl
| Important bugfix that should be deployed immediately
* f158085 2 days ago Jesse Shawl
| worked on experimental feature
* eb945d6 (origin/master) 3 days ago Jesse Shawl
| ready for deploy; all tests passing
* e29e182 6 weeks ago Jesse shawl
| initial commit
I can’t just git push origin master, because that would deploy my not-yet-ready
work on the experimental feature. Lesson learned: I should have used a feature branch to keep master
in a deployable, always production-ready state.
That’s ok though. It’s possible to retroactively create the feature branch and deploy the important bugfix.
First, create a new feature-1 branch, and base it off of the relevant commit.
$ git branch -b feature-1 f158085
Then, delete the feature-1 related commits from the master branch:
$ git rebase -i origin/master
You’ll see a list like:
pick f158085 worked on experimental feature
pick e55c976 Important bugfix that should be deployed immediately
Just delete the lines that you don’t want – in this case the first one, and save and quit the file.
The ouput of git log should look something like:
* e55c976 (HEAD, master) 1 day ago Jesse Shawl
| Important bugfix that should be deployed immediately
| * f158085 (feature-1) 2 days ago Jesse Shawl
|/ worked on experimental feature
* eb945d6 (origin/master) 3 days ago Jesse Shawl
| ready for deploy; all tests passing
* e29e182 6 weeks ago Jesse shawl
| initial commit
Now I can deploy my master branch. When I’m ready to continue working on the
experimental feature, I just need to switch to the feature-1 branch:
$ git checkout feature-1