Branching
If you’re planning to
- change huge parts of your code at once
- introduce a complex new feature or another API
- switch easily between different – simultaneously running – development processes of your project (actually, that’s called a branch)
you’re better off creating a new branch. As soon as you switch to this branch, the former version won’t get touched anymore. You can easily merge back the changes from the new branch to your master version.
First, list the local branches
git branch
Creating a branch
You start by creating a new local branch
git branch dynamic
we call the new branch dynamic.
Then switch to your new branch. The code will be the exact state when you left the former branch.
git checkout dynamic
You can now apply changes, commit and push to your new branch.
Don’t forget to push the new branch to your remote repository
git push origin dynamic
Merge the branch back
After you think your changes should go back to the master branch, merge ’em, where the newer will supersede all of master
git checkout master git pull . dynamic git push
{is git pull . dynamic + git push =?= git merge dynamic}
Tagging
I often explain a tag in git as a bookmark which lets you return to some specific version of your code. As you can have an unlimited amount of tags, you can have as many bookmarks as you need.
So when you want to take a snapshot of your code saying “if I had releases, and would package my code, this version would be packaged as 2.2.1.tar.gz” why not simply tag it as 2.2.1?
To list the bookmarks you already made, enter
git tag -l
Creating a tag
Right after you found some nifty name for your tag – let’s say we call it 2.3 – create an annotated (not signed) tag with
git tag -a 2.3
Until here the tag will reside in your local repository only and will be pushed to your remote repos instantly if you command
git push --tags
You can switch back to any version you tagged using
git checkout 2.3
which is really helpful for both developers and users since you can distribute multiple versions in one repository.
Deleting a tag
If you simply want to delete a local tag, do
git tag -d v3.3.4
However, if you need to remove that tag from your remote github repository, you simply push nothing to the tag name.
git push origin :refs/tags/v3.3.4
Nick Sutterer 