Skip to content
Contact →

Git for Professionals

Updated
17 Sept 2026
3 min read
2 sections
Page 4 of 4
Git & GitHub

Perfect Git Commit

  • File staging helps in better commits, (easier to manage, review code and adding commit messages).
  • Use git diff <file>, to view the changes made to the not staged file.
  • Use git -p to stage certain chucks of changes in a file.
  • y -> stage hunk
  • n -> do not stage hunk
  • a -> stage all remaining hunks
  • d -> do not stage any remaining hunks
  • s -> split the current hunk
  • e -> manually edit the current hunk
  • Use git commit to open a text editor (default: vi editor, or use git config --global core.editor <editor_name>)
  • Format for commit message:
  1. 1st line: Subject
  2. 2nd line: &lt;blank&gt;
  3. 3rd line: Body

a. What is now different than before? b. What is the reason for the change? c. Is there anything to watch out for / anything particularly remarkable

Branching Strategies

Convention:

(agree on a Branching Work-flow in a team)

  1. Git allows users to create branches - learning it for better usage would improve the work-flow
  2. A written best practice / strategy to ideally structure work in between team members
  3. Team members, team size and type of project plays a huge role in managing project releases.
  4. Helping new on-board team members to understand the work-flow to reduce conflicts

Integrating Changes & Structuring Releases

Mainline Development

(always be integrating)

-> few branches -> relatively small commit -> high-quality testing & QA standards

State, Release, and Feature Branches

(Branches Enhance Structures & Workflows)

-> different types of branches -> fulfil different types of jobs

Long-Running & Short-Lived Branches

600
600

Long Running Branches

  • Long Running Branches are the branches which exist through out the project.
  • Every Git repository has a long running branches like main or master branch.
  • Some repositories have develop or staging long running branches, generally for stability testing before merging to master branch.
  • These branches represent the different stages of release and deployment.
  • Commit are not directly made to long-running branches.

Short Lived Branches

  • They are created for certain purposed (like new features, bug fixes, refactoring).
  • They are deleted after being merged or rebased to the long running branch.
  • A short lived branch is based on a long running branch.

Git Workflows

GitHub Flow

  • It consists of only 1 long running branch (main) and working changes are made in short lived branches.

Git-Flow

  • It consists of 2 long running branches (main + develop) and short lived branches (feature, release, hotfixes).

Develop Branch

  • The develop branch serves as an integration branch of feature.

Creating develop branch

  • Using git, git branch develop & git push -u origin develop
  • Using git-flow extension, git flow init

Feature Branch

  • The feature branch uses develop as their parent branch and feature never directly interacts with main.

Creating feature branch

  • Using git, git checkout develop & git checkout -b feature_branch
  • Using git-flow extension, git flow feature start feature_branch

Merging feature to develop

  • Using git, git checkout develop & git merge feature_branch
  • Using git-flow, git flow feature finish feature_branch

Release Branch

  • After develop branch has acquired enough features for a release.
  • A release branch is branched off develop branch.
  • Documentations, bug fixes, and release-oriented tasks of new features are pushed to release branch.
  • Using git, git checkout develop & git checkout -b release/<version>.
  • Using git flow extension, git flow release start <version>.
  • Once release branch is ready, it is merged to main branch.
  • release branch is merged back to develop branch and release branch is deleted
  • Using git, git checkout main & git merge release/<version>
  • Using git flow extension, git flow release finish <version>

Hotfix Branch

  • The hotfix branched off main branch, for quick patch production releases.
  • As soon as the fix is complete, it is merged into main & develop branch.
  • A dedicated branch for bug fixes, helps team to address issues and speed up the release cycle.
  • Using git, git checkout main & git checkout -b hotfix_branch.
  • Using git flow extension git flow hotfix start hotfix_branch.

Pull Requests

  • Pull request is request to merge changes to other repositories (pushing changes are not allowed).
  • It gets many developers involved for reviewing the code and fix bugs (if any) before merging it to main branch.

Fork Repository

  • Fork creates a copy of a repository with administrator permissions, to which we are allowed to make changes.