A Complete Git Feature Branch Workflow

Summary

A concise and practical end to end guide for practicing the Git Feature Branch Workflow, for more details and source documentation see Git Feature Branch Workflow by Atlassian

In short each change, story , feature, or defect gets its own branch, and that branch will get merged via a pull request back into main when it is ready.

Getting started and the Checkout

git clone https://gitserver.com/user/pathToYourRepo.git

Feel free to replace main with master as needed depending on how and when your repo was configured.

git checkout main
git pull origin

This reset is optional do it if you want a clean slate each time

git reset --hard origin/main 

Create the branch

Feel free to name the branch what makes most sense for you, but I commonly do stuff like name it after issues or defect number I am working on.

git checkout -b your-feature-branch

Making changes

The as usual workload for git now

git add <things-to-add>
git commit

Pushing your changes back to the repo

I simply do

git push

Then I receive this lovely error response that includes the solution I am looking for at the end

fatal: The current branch your-feature-branch has no upstream branch.
To push the current branch and set the remote as upstream, use
    git push --set-upstream origin your-feature-branch

Copy and paste just the following part of the reply and press enter.

git push --set-upstream origin your-feature-branch

For the next push you can just continue doing a normal push as follows

git push

Keeping your branch up to date

The missing secret to success, since if your working on a project with multiple developers or if priorities change, you will soon discover this is needed, otherwise things will be horribly out of date with your code to merge back into the updated main branch, and then you will be entering a world of pain. It’s ok to run this update process after a pull request, but I prefer to do pre pull request.

git checkout main
git pull
git checkout your-feature-branch
git merge main
git push

Opening the pull request

This process will vary depending on what your using to host your repository, but I will leave that as exercise for you to figure out, most of the time it involves visiting the repo url in a browser and clicking a series of buttons to open a pull request.

Approve or reject the changes

Same with this process, you will need to review the code and press the appropriate buttons to approve or reject the changes.

Merge the changes

This part will happen when you satisfied with the changes and ready to merge them into your main branch. This will be a series of button presses on a web interface of your repository solution of choice.

Delete the branch

As a final step when you’re done with merging the pull request, the UI will put up a button to delete the branch that was merged in. Feel free to do so as you wish, this will help keep you keep the list of active branches reasonable.