How do you use git when working solo?

Comments

[Ben Halpern]

Personally — I rarely branch off of main while working solo, but I do maintain high standards of committing regularly with good messages.

That's high level, but would love to hear a few more detailed answers from folks!

[Yechiel Kalmenson]

I generally don't branch off main unless I'm doing a long and fairly involved feature. Mainly so it should be easy to throw the work away if it turns out to be too hard or too long to keep working on.

[Rubin]

I second you Ben. I do maintain some quality commit messages following the conventional commit. That would help me in future track what went wrong and on which commit rather than scratching my head for an hour or two

[spO0q]

I also branch off on very few occasion when working solo, but I use tags.

[Renan Franca]

I do the same. But I started to create branches to be committed to releasing a new version to myself 😅. So doesn't feel like an endless project 😆

[Dendi Handian]

pretty much the same

[leob]

Same for me - using it essentially in the same way but rarely using other branches than master.

[Raunak Ramakrishnan]

For solo projects, I use git as a journal using meaningful commit messages and to mark "save points" where I know the code is working fine. I use git tags as a memorable way to mark the aforementioned good commits. I do not make as much use of branches as I should because it is easy to checkout to a safe commit using tags.

[Nissi Lawrence Kazembe]

Interesting usage, I will definitely adopt this. Quite a handy debugging method especially for side projects.

[Luke Westby]

lots of commits to main with messages like “changes” and “more changes”

[Benjamin G.]

70% "fix"
25% "added [thing]"
5% random rambling
100% useless to anyone but me

[Camille]

2:00am - “saving here to continue tomorrow”
10:00am - “done”
6:00pm - “mobile styling done”
6:01pm - “oops forgot something”
… etc

[Areskul]

I always make a main, and a dev branch.
I fork the dev branch in many feature/* branches that I merge to the dev.

git branch feature/vite
git merge feature/vite

Heavy usage of "gitu" alias to push to remotes and mirrors.

alias gitu="git commit -a | git push"

and when I need add modification to previous commit.

git commit --amend

And I try to write good commit messages following Angular conventions.

When I'm satisfied with my work I tag it (for further fast version reverse).

git tag 0.4.5

In case I need to revert bad changes that went into main branch(production)

git checkout 0.4.4

What about you?!

[Thomas Broyer]

I really don't get that main vs dev in git-flow.

[Sanam]

Ongoing development features branches will be merged to dev regularly and dev will be merged to main when dev becomes stable and mergable.

[Thomas Broyer]

That doesn't explain (and even less so justify) why you do it.

Also, does that mean that dev is not always in a releasable state?

[Areskul]

Yes, dev is unstable !

[Thomas Broyer]

You're saying this as if it's a feature. In projects I work on, they could be released/deployed almost at any time (at a minimum they are deployable to a testing/demo server), and if the tip of the branch happens to not be, we can easily deploy/release a version from a few commits earlier. Tag it and call it a day. I don't get that "merge dev to master" process.

Are you really saying your dev branch can at times be in a state where you'd say about it: "oh yes, this is currently entirely broken, but don't worry, we'll fix it in time for the scheduled release"?

[Sanam]

Dev is not totally unstable! It's yet not ready for production. All internal phases (dev, test, regression) will be carried out here and finally will be merged into stable branch (name as per your preference)

[Jan Küster]

Yes, for several reasons:

• documentation / log / tags
• backup to origin or other upstream
• easy to make a solo git project a collaboration project
• ci/cd tooling + tagged releases
• keep git skills up to date

[Rebecca DuPont]

I use git for organizational purposes when working solo. I don't really stem off the main branch, but the commenting and commit notes help to keep my multiple projects organized and remind me where I was when I last left off. Overall, I think it's good practice to practice how you would work in a team environment, so I do not do sloppy messages when committing.

[Jake Nelson]

I build out fantastic CI/CD processes for features branches and pull requests, then ignore them and commit straight to main.

[Taufik Nurrohman]

• git status
• git diff
• PageDown PageDown …
• q
• git add .
• git commit -m Update
• git push -u origin main
• Repeat.
• git rebase -i HEAD~10
• reword
• reword
• reword
• squash
• squash
• squash
• git push -f

[Joe Mainwaring]

• I still create feature branches to commit changes
• I squash on merge. This results in a smaller main trunk with better quality messages and clear points to revert.
• Releases are tagged off of the main trunk.

[Zachary Ferguson]

For consistency's sake, I try to mirror what I do at work (practice makes perfect and all that) other than maybe branching. Gotta make more commits for that sweet sweet dark green block on my activity graph :)

I haven't heard about tags though, I'm definitely gonna have to check it out! Still got to git good