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My Git Work Flow

· 2 min read

Here's the git flow I use while working on our latest iOS app Mirror Mirror:

Identify the current branch

git branch
  MVP
  master
* yennefer

yennefer (wink to The Witcher 3) is the branch that both PL and I will commit to for the next release. I can just make changes on this branch directly, then git add => git commit => git push, which usually works just fine.

However sometimes doing this might get me caught in an awkward situation, especially when I'm making a significant set of sweeping changes that touch many different files, variables and callbacks that take some time to finish. Many things could happen before I can push. I might not get to a point where I can git push yet, and the next best thing is git reset --hard, which would be terrible.

So I would create a new branch off yennefer instead, git commit every incremental change to this new branch, merge this branch with yennefer when everything is ready, then git push from yennefer to the remote.

git checkout -b change-touchable
Switched to a new branch 'change-touchable'

git branch
  MVP
* change-touchable
  master
  yennefer

Commit every incremental change with git add . and git commit, but no git push just yet. So all these changes are only saved locally in this local branch. This local branch change-touchable will only exist on this local machine. If something happens to the machine or Internet connection, I can still git checkout to any particular commit in this new branch without losing any work.

When done with all the changes, switch back to branch yennefer:

git checkout yennefer

From branch yennefer, merge the newly created branch change-touchable, which now contains all the new commits:

git merge change-touchable

Push to the remote (still on yennefer):

git push

After all is said and done, delete branch change-touchable as it's no longer needed

git branch -D change-touchable

This is a much more elegant and fail-proof method than just committing every change to yennefer as it happens.

Frequent Uses​

To display the remote destination that the local git repo points to

git remote show origin

To show uncommitted changes in Git

git diff
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