Git Branching Strategies and The Greek Revival

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2021-06-17 05:30:06

11 minute read Updated: June 16, 2021 Adam Gordon Bell

Some modern development practices are easiest to understand from a historical perspective: things started a certain way, and then steps were added or removed as conditions changed. Git branching, for example, is like that.

I’m going to explain various git branching strategies with a story. We will start with something straightforward and add complexity as we go. Eventually, we will end up back simple again.

I hope that explaining things this way will give you a deeper understanding of when to use specific branching and merging strategies. So instead of telling you how to cherry-pick a bug fix into a hotfix branch using gitflow work, I can describe the conditions that would lead to adopting that process. Once you understand the whys, the hows will be easier.

The year is 2006, and Ashely Protagonist starts a software business. She builds and sells an eCommerce solution she wrote in PHP. It’s just her building and selling it, but she uses a new source control solution called git to store her software. She starts with trunk-based development.