Git Flow

We will be using Git to version control our project, to ensure that we keep our repository clean and manageable we will use Git Flow, a widely recognised branching/release strategy based on two trunk branches main and develop.

TL;DR: essentially it's the same as what we're used to doing, but instead of branching from and merging into main, we branch from and merge into develop. We then have a separate release process to merge develop into main which gives us a bit of a guarantee that main always stays in a good state.

The trunk branches

The main branch always contains code that is currently deployed right now, it is always kept in a production ready state. No one can commit to main, and it can only be updated by performing a release (see below). In addition we do not branch off from main for feature work, only in extreme circumstance for hotfixes (see below).

The develop branch contains the code that will be in the next release. We branch off from develop to create feature branches and we merge these back into develop when the feature is complete.

Releases

When we are happy with the code that is in develop we create a release branch named release/x.y.z where x.y.z is the new version number. We test this branch until we are happy that it is working (any bug fixes on this branch can be continuously merged back into develop). Once our release branch is good we can merge it into main and we tag main with the new version number. This can trigger whatever deployment pipelines we have in place as we are sure that this code is working and should be deployed. The release branch must also be merged back into develop so develop remains up to date.

Hotfixes

In the hopefully rare case that some bug sneaks past into production we can create a hotfix branch named hotfix/<something>. This is a branch off of main and is the only time we are allowed to do this. We must fix the bug making as few changes as possible, and then merge the hotfix branch into main and develop.

Further reading

Check out the original Git Flow article it goes into a lot more depth:

https://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/