If you’re working on a new feature, or pushing a bug fix to your site, branching is a great way to ensure you don’t cause any issues with your main version.

In this article, we will cover the concepts of branching and merging; using Git as our version control system in the examples covered.

Introduction

In this article, we are going to cover 3 commands – branch, checkout and merge .A branch is essentially a version of your app that can work on, for example a development or bug fix branch. Checkout is the process of switching from one branch to another, so you don’t make changes to the wrong version of your site. Finally, merge brings two different branches into one, effectively creating a single version of your site from two different versions..

Creating a Branch

Lets say that our website is live and online, but we would like to add a new feature, let’s say a shopping cart so our customers can start buying our product.

We will create a new branch called cart:

$ git checkout -b cart
Switched to a new branch 'cart'


This creates a new branch called cart and automatically switches to it, ready to start working on. That command is shorthand for the following:

$ git branch cart
$ git checkout cart


So now we have two branches, our main branch, referred to as master, and our newly created cart branch.

Another Branch

We are now working in our cart branch, and unfortunately we found a bug on our live site. At this point, we should create a new branch:

$ git checkout -b bugfix
Switched to a new branch 'bugfix'


We can work on our fix without disturbing the site, and commit it to our bugfix branch:

$ git commit -m "fixed the bug"
[bugfix 54sdwe] fixed bug
1 file changed


And now push the branch to our remote repository:

$ git push -u origin buxfix
* [new branch] bugfix -> bugfix
Branch bugfix set up to track remote branch bugfix from origin


Merging a Branch

We have tested the fix and we are happy, so let’s merge this change into master. But first, we need to switch back to our master branch:

$ git checkout master
Switched to branch 'master'
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'


Now we can merge our bugfix:

$ git merge bugfix
Updating fb3af6..54sdwe
Fast-forward
index.html | 1
1 file changed


And push to GitHub:

$ git push origin master
Total 0 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
to [email protected]:bhavik/website-project/repository.git
fb3af6..54sdwe master -> master


Cleanup Old Branches

Everything looks good, and the bug is now fixed and deployed. Let’s remove our bugfix branch:

$ git branch -d bugfix
Deleted branch bugfix (was 54sdwe)


We will want to remove the branch from our remote repository as well.

$ git push origin --delete bugfix
To [email protected]:bhavik/website-project/repository.git
- [deleted] bugfix