Lately I’ve been acting as the unofficial Git consultant for Skribit, usually in response to @Stammy saying something on Twitter along the lines of “Hey, git just did something totally nonintuitive and now I can’t figure out what to do next.” I’ve been using Git long enough to know the answer, usually, or at least to be able to figure it out, plus I still remember how people used to SVN think, which helps.

image provided by twictur.es | original tweet here

I think I’ve mentioned before how much I love Git. I’ve been a version control geek for a really long time: I remember getting way too excited about a feature that was like ‘git cherry-pick’ in some proprietary VCS we evaluated in 2000 or 2001. I still say that Darcs is the one I wish we had settled on, but I’ve grown to love Git over the past year or so, especially with GitHub making some of the rough spots so much easier.

The thing that’s hard about Git for most people is the same thing that’s hard about all DVCS tools: if you’re used to centralized systems, they work weird. GitHub doesn’t actually help with this: it’s really easy to use Git+GitHub like SVN, and not take full advantage of all the cool stuff you get in a DVCS. It’s also really easy to never grok DVCS, so when something unusual happens, you don’t know how to fix it.

There are lots of really good articles to help you get Git, and I’m not going to try to duplicate them, nor am I going to make you a comprehensive list. Ask in the comments if you can’t find what you need, and feel free to share good resources in the comments as well. One I’ll throw out there now is Git for Computer Scientists … if you want to really know what Git is doing, this is the way to go.

What I will do is give you a snapshot of my personal Git workflow(s). I have several, depending on the kind of project.

Small team: one or two person project

A lot of my projects involve either just me, or me and Don, or me and someone else. For these projects I don’t usually take much advantage of the power of Git. It goes something like this.

git pull

Hack some stuff

git commit -a -m "hacked some stuff"

git push

I rarely use topic branches when I’m in this mode, and I don’t pay too much attention to keeping a clean commit history. In short, I use it alot like I would use SVN.

Every now and then I’ll get distracted by a quick bug fix when I have a bunch of code I don’t want to commit yet. That’s where stashing comes in.

git stash (all my changes are saved away, and I have a clean tree)

(all my changes are saved away, and I have a clean tree) Fix the bug

git commit -a -m "bugfix"

git stash pop (changes are back)

(changes are back) Continue where I left off

Larger team

Lately, I’ve been doing some client work to pay the bills, which means I’m working with a group of other developers with a lot of tickets being handled all at once. To minimize my pain (and to keep nice and clean commit logs) I use my own version of the SSP: Simplified Software Process.

git co master

git pull

Find a ticket to work on. Let’s say it’s “Add flanges to the WangleController”

git co -b flanges_in_wangle

Write a test, write some code, etc.

Commit only what I know I want to commit. I use git add -p to be selective.

to be selective. git commit --amend (I write really nice commit messages when there are other people looking at the code, and I use amend to bundle all my changes into one commit)

(I write really nice commit messages when there are other people looking at the code, and I use amend to bundle all my changes into one commit) Run the tests and make sure they pass

git co master

git pull

git co flanges_in_wangle

git rebase master

At this point, either it goes well or I have merge conflicts. If I have conflicts, I fix them, and keep going. It’s better to have conflicts on a topic branch than in master.

Run the tests again. If there are any code changes, commit, then repeat from checking out master again. The idea is to make sure that when you finally merge flanges_in_wangle into master, it’s going to be a clean fast-forward merge with no conflicts.

Once I’m sure flanges_in_wangle is ready, git co master

git merge flanges_in_wangle

git push

Enlightenment

On my most recent large project that I started from scratch, I use something like the above, with one major exception: there is no ‘master’.

Using ‘origin’ as the name of your remote and ‘master’ as the name of your main branch is just the default settings git gives you. Neither name is magic. So, I renamed ‘origin’ to ‘github’ in .git/config to be explicit about where the code is going. Then, I created a new branch ‘development’ to reflect the code that is under the mainline of development.

Then I deleted ‘master’.

Yeah, you heard me. Who needs it?

Once I was ready for stuff to go to staging, I made a ‘staging’ branch, and likewise for ‘production’. Topic branches merge into ‘development’, which is merged periodically into ‘staging’, which gets promoted to ‘production’ when it’s ready for deployment. There’s never any doubt about what code is on each environment; just look in the git repo.

The downside to this is that when you first clone the repo, it’s broken, because git tries to checkout ‘master’ and it doesn’t exist. Not a big deal, just setup the right branches and all is well.

And you?

So what’s your git workflow? Share it in the comments, or blog about it and tell us about it.

PS: This blog post was written in direct response to a Skribit suggestion. I don’t promise I’ll blog about anything people ask me to, but it’s possible I will. If you’d like to get that kind of feedback on your blog, check Skribit out. They came out of the first Atlanta Startup Weekend, and are doing some very cool things.