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Workflows

Branching

You can also use branches via Git.

You can use branches to:

  • Develop new features
  • Bug fixes
  • Experiment with new ideas without influencing your production code (code that is online)

This is a walkthrough to work with 2 branches, namely develop and main branches. You can find the production ready code on the main branch. On the develop branch, on the other hand, you can commit code that is not yet completely ready to show to your end user.

Once you’re happy with the (bug-free) code in the develop branch, you can merge it into the main branch. This process is explained further.

You continue working on the current project.

Create a branch develop by executing the following command:

Terminal window
git branch develop

Get an overview of all the branches

Terminal window
git branch

Now that we have created a new develop branch, we can switch to it by running git checkout develop:

Terminal window
git checkout develop

Make some commits on the develop branch.

We would now like to merge our code from develop with our main code, so that both branches contain the same code (now develop has more commits than main, i.e. develop stands before main). For this we first have to switch back to our main branch and merge develop into it in a next step:

Terminal window
git checkout main

The merge of develop in main is done by the git merge command:

Terminal window
git merge develop main

Switch back to develop immediately, so you don’t accidentally develop in the main branch (we want our develop branch to always have the most recent code):

Terminal window
git checkout develop

Master/main

Historically, often the terms ‘master’ and ‘slave’ were used to name branches. In hindsight, these were offensive to say the least, so a more inclusive alternative ‘main’ became the default branch on many platforms.

That is why you will come across some ‘master’ branches in code examples or tutorials.

A ‘main’ branch doesn’t have any superpowers or other special features, in the end, it is just a name.

You can easily rename a branch with the following command:

Terminal window
git branch -m OLD-BRANCH-NAME NEW-BRANCH-NAME

If you like to gain some more background information on this, you can read this article