We use a form of Git flow to maintain a stable master branch, and work off feature branches to introduce new features and other code updates. The feature branches are tied to JIRA tickets.
To keep our git log clean and tidy we use git's rebase strategy. That means that instead of merging commits in and out of the master branch (resulting in many ugly merge commits) we always keep our own feature branch's commits on top of the existing master branch commits.
You can read more about the rebase strategy here: https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/merging-vs-rebasing.
If you're not familiar with the rebase strategy don't worry - below you'll find the detailed steps to get the job done with git :)
When writing the git commit message, please stick to a maximum of 72 characters length for both the subject line and the message itself.
The subject line should start with the JIRA ID of the appropriate ticket it belongs to, and it should summarise what the code changes do.
When squashing the commits of a feature branch into a single commit, please make sure that the commit message explains what the code updates do.
Here is an example:
[DJC-9] Add 'Worked outside UK' section
The 'Worked outside UK' section asks the claimant questions about
whether or not he/she claimed any benefits whilst living in an EEA
country.
If in doubt about the formatting, just check the previous commit messages on the master branch. If still in doubt, check out this document.
We use rebase strategy when merging code in. Once a feature branch is complete, we squash all commits on it into 1 meaningful commit (rebasing on top os master branch), then merge the feature branch's single commit into master branch.
Please refer to the following steps
$ git checkout master
$ git pull --rebase origin master
The
git pull --rebasecommand makes sure that you localmasterbranch is aligned with the remotemasterbranch.
$ git branch DJC-XX-my-feature
$ git checkout DJC-XX-my-feature
Note how we use the Jira ticket ID to clearly identify the code changes with the relevant business requirement.
Make changes, create new commits, work work work...
Just in case your laptop gets swallowed up by a black hole :)
$ git pull --rebase origin DJC-XX-my-feature
First pull the latest updates of the branch from origin (only have to do this if someone else is also working on the branch and might have pushed updates to origin), then push your changes to the origin.
$ git push origin DJC-XX-my-feature
Once a feature branch is complete, tested, and approved by the PO, you can go ahead and merge it into the master branch.
To keep the git log consistently clean and tidy, we squash the commits of each feature branch into a single commit.
$ git checkout DJC-XX-my-feature
$ git fetch --prune
$ git pull --rebase origin master
Make sure you update your feature branch with the latest version of the master branch; then you can squash your commits using interactive rebasing:
$ git rebase -i origin/master
Make sure you follow our git commit message guidelines above.
Once you're done with squashing, once again push your updates to remote origin, and make a new pull request on Github.
Every new PR should be peer-reviewed. Once the PR was approved by the reviewer, the PR can be merged into master branch.
$ git checkout master
$ git fetch --prune
$ git pull --rebase origin master
$ git merge origin DJC-XX-my-feature
$ git push origin master
Once a feature branch was merged into master, it should be deleted.