Game ProgrammingGit Flow

Nick Prühs

Objectives

• To understand how to develop separate features without interfering with other team members

• To get an idea of how to prepare a new release using a dedicated branch

• To learn how to integrate hotfixes in live environments

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GitFlow

• Originally developed by Vincent Driessen

• Assigns very specific roles to different branches, and defines how and when they should interact

• Allows merging and branching to be part of your daily workflow

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Main Branches

• master• origin/master HEAD is always ready for production

• develop• origin/develop HEAD always contains the latest

delivered development changes

• Nightly builds are created from this branch

• Whenever considered stable, merged back into masterand tagged

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Main Branches

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Supporting branches

• Feature branches• Allow parallel development

• Make tracking features easier

• Release branches• Help preparing for releases

• Hotfix branches• Enable you to quickly fix live problems

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Feature Branches

• Branch from and merge back into develop

• Used for developing new features

• Exists while the feature is in development

• Will eventually be• Merged back, to include the new feature in the next

release, or

• Discarded, if the feature should not be included

• Never directly interact with the master branch

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Feature Branches

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Hint

Merging with the “no fast-forward”option causes the merge to alwayscreate a new commit. This makestracking of your branches a loteasier!

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Release Branches

• Branch from develop, and merge back into develop and master

• Created when all desired features for the next release have been merged back into develop

• Supports preparation of a new production release• Setting up meta-data such as version numbers or

database connections

• Generating API documentation

• Features for the next release can already merge back into develop

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Release Branches

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Hint

Whenever changes are mergedback into master, this is a newproduction release by definition!

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Hotfix Branches

• Branch from master, and merge back into develop and master

• Created when a critical bug in a production release has to be resolved immediately

• Other team members can continue working on new features or the next release

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Hotfix Branches

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Hint

Unlike the two main branches, allsupporting branches will be mergedand removed eventually!

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References

• Vincent Driessen. A successful Git branchin model. http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/, January 5, 2010.

• Atlassian. Gitflow Workflow. https://www.atlassian.com/git/workflows#!workflow-gitflow, June 2014.

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Thank you for your attention!

Contact

Mail

dev@npruehs.de

Blog

http://www.npruehs.de

Twitter

@npruehs

Github

https://github.com/npruehs

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