Git - Dev/DevOps best friend

#cicd #git

In a software, Git is more than just a version control system - It's a backbone of the entire project. It acts as a single source of truth, it store anything related to code and infrastructure.

Why Git is important

Git solves 3 big problems:

History changes:Every changes is recorded, making it easy to review, revert, or understand the evolution of the code.
Automation workflow:Git integrates seamlessly with CI/CD pipelines, enabling automated testing, building, and deployment.
Made/keep an update:Git ensures that everyone works with the latest version, reducing conflicts and improving team efficiency.

Tips for using Git effectively

Small commit and clearly message: You should commit a small part, not a big change and writing clearly message which describe what you did
Give a meaning name for branch: Don't make your team member be confuse or guessing what the branch do
Keep the main branch stable: Ensure code in main branch is always stable, even new members can clone and run it without error
Tag version: Tagging version for rollback / manage easily

Branching strategy in Git

Now a day, we have two popular strategies

Git flow
Trunk-Based

Let's take a look into it 👀

Git flow

In real-world projects, we often create many branches—and each branch serves a specific purpose. Depending on your company or team, branch names might differ, but they should still align with the core structure of Git Flow.

main: production-ready branch, it contain stable and deployable code
hotfix: Urgent fixes for production issues. Branched from main and merged into both main and develop
release: Code ready for final testing before merging into main
develop: The integration branch for development
features: Developing new features, typical branched from develop and merged back when completed

We can use git flow for a big team or projects have complex release cycles

Trunk-Based

In trunk-based, we only have two branches main and features, with features's life-time is smaller and shorter than git flow (usually 2-3 days). This strategy helps us take advantage of automation in git.