Gitflow Workflow

How it works?

• Two main branches,"master" and "develop".

• The "master" branch  will reflect our  production environment.
  • Each merge to master has a "tag".

• The "develop" branch will reflect our edge environment.

Feature Branches

• Each feature should have it's own branch.

• Branch out of "develop" instead of "master".

• When a feature is complete merge back to "develop".

Release Branches

• Branch out from "develop".

• New features are not allowed, only bug fixes or release oriented tasks.

• Once done merge both to "master" and "develop".

  • Don't forget to tag "master" once merged.

Hotfix Branches

• Branch out from "master".
• Just like a release branch, merge to "master" and "develop" once done.
  • Also tag "master" once merged.

Best Practice

• Unit Testing
• Code Review for each pull/merge request.
  • At least one person already approved before merging.
• When a build fails, everybody stops working to fix the build.
• Squashing Commits (?)
• Use present tense on commit messages.

Cons

• A little complex, and managing two main long-lived branches is tedious.
• Branching out from a wrong base branch is easy and may pose problems.
• Lot's of merge commits happening due to different conventions, and may lead to harder to read history.

Alternatives

• GitHub Flow
• GitLab Flow
• Trunk Based Development

Semantic Versioning

What is SemVer?

• Versioning standard for our releases.

• Major.Minor.Patch

  • Major - for API breaking changes
  • Minor - for backwards compatible changes
  • Patch - for bug-fixes or hot fixes

For Discussion

• Release Candidate management and automation
  • We manage git tags manually. This is more on how we tag our Docker images with our CI.

Best Practice

• Tag every merge to our "master" branch.
• Tags from our repo should also reflect tags from our Docker builds.
• Create a CHANGELOG per release/version.

Cons

• If your software is not being depended on or doesn't really break backwards-compatibility (e.g. Linux Kernel), your "Minor" and "Patch" are the only ones being bumped.

Alternatives

• Calendar Versioning (CalVer)