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Git Branching, Step-by-Step

Funda on March 18, 2018

"Stop. Collaborate and Listen." ~ V. Ice Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode It is highly recommen...

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Ben Halpern • Mar 18 '18

Nice post Funda.

For STEP 4, I'd also suggest git add -p as a means of deciding which files to include. It lets you step through all your changes and give a y or n to decide what to stage.

Funda • Mar 18 '18

I love that. I am trying to be absolutely minimal (MVP) here, since this was written for the classroom & there is always a lot of confusion when students first encounter this. Perhaps I will add links to handle more shortcuts, best practices, and features.

Ben Halpern • Mar 18 '18

👌

Roldán Galán • Mar 18 '18

This is a nice article, however steps 9 and 10 should be swapped.

First you pull the updated master and then you remove the feature branch. Otherwise you will need to force branch delete (git branch -D) because your local repo doesn't know yet that the branch is already merged. And forcing is not nice ;).

Cheers!

Funda • Mar 18 '18 • Edited

yes this is right --- I will edit! And you are correct that forcing anything isn't nice at all.
Thank you for the improvement!

Jeffrey Goldberg • Mar 19 '18

Should there be a git merge master between steps 6 and 7? I try to resolve conflicts, if any, before I submit the PR.

Mario Estrada • Jul 6 '18 • Edited

Jeffrey,

Your question is valid 100%. after git checkout mybranchname we should perform a git merge master. It is at this stage that conflicts may appear and you have a chance to fix them. This way you make sure your branch won't conflict with the remote master branch.

Even more, when several developers are working release updates constantly to the master branch, we advise them to perform this sync process often to see how your changes operates in the whole application.

Funda • Mar 20 '18

the merge happens on the website not from the terminal. This is for students to be able to visualize it in the GUI.

John Costanzo • Mar 20 '18

So are you saying that git pull origin master is not required? Why would I pull master locally then just push my branch up?

Funda • Mar 20 '18

git pull origin master is being executed again at step 5. when you push to your branch it creates the pull request on the github website.

Funda • Jun 29 '22

Updated with changes!

Shahroz Nawaz • Mar 19 '18

Hey Funda nice effort you've put in the article. I've also written an article on Manage Branches and Resolve Conflicts. Your Feedback would be welcome :)

cloudways.com/blog/manage-branches...

Stephen Chiang • Mar 19 '18

Hi Funda,

Shouldn't one pull from the master after committing changes to your branch so that you are up to date and can resolve and merge conflicts before doing the PR?

Funda • Mar 19 '18

you mean switch to master, 'git checkout master', then switch back to branch and 'git push origin branch'? Yes...this is what I do, but I found with students too much switching caused confusion. It's either extra switching or extra merge conflicts.

Stephen Chiang • Mar 19 '18 • Edited

Maybe I'm confused, but I thought that if others have been working on their own branch and in the process of working on mine, a few PRs have been merged...so before I push to my remote and initiate a PR, I should git pull from the current master to my branch?

Kind of like this:

$ git add .
$ git commit -m "comments"
$ git pull origin master
$ git push origin myBranchName

Then open a PR.

Sergio Picciau • Mar 20 '18

You can so you will eventually get conflicts on your feature branch and solve them before pushing to remote.

Funda • Mar 20 '18

that's in the steps now, edited ;-)

Stephen Chiang • Mar 20 '18

I see that in Step 5 you switch back to master to pull to your local copy of master, but how does that update your local branch without pulling master to your local branch?

I guess I still don't really understand why you would switch back to master and then back to branch. Thanks!

Leah Einhorn • Aug 5 '18

Valid question. Just doing git pull origin master in Step 5 will NOT update your local branch. This tutorial is missing a step between 6 and 7. Essentially after you git pull origin master in Step 5, and git checkout mybranchname in step 6, you will run git merge master to combine the master branch changes into your feature branch, named mybranchname. Hope that helps!

Idan Arye • Mar 19 '18

You skipped a step between 4 and 5 - you forgot to create the pull request.

Funda • Mar 19 '18 • Edited

It’s implied in the ‘keep clicking green buttons’ part after you go to the Github site. I have edited this now to assume reader has collaborator permissions. You are right that if this were an open source project, the user would have to create a pull request. But these steps are for students who are just learning to become team collaborators, and for them, the pull request is created when you push origin mybranchname in terminal. Thank you!

Stephen Chiang • Aug 5 '18

I really like using the following to flip back and forth between the two most recent branches. Saves time and having to remember some complicated branch name!