blog.lazkani.io/content/posts/git-branching-and-merging.md

+++ title = "Git! Branching and Merging" author = ["Elia el Lazkani"] date = 2019-08-01 lastmod = 2019-08-01 tags = ["git", "branch", "merge"] categories = ["revision-control"] draft = false +++

In the previous post about git, we had a look at what git is and got our feet wet with a bit of it. In this post, I will be moving forward with the topic, I will be talking about branches, how to work with them and finally what merging is and how it works.

Requirements

The same requirement we had from the last post, obviously git.

Branching and Merging

What is a branch?

git documentation describes it as:

"A branch in Git is simply a lightweight movable pointer to one of the[se] commits."

Usually, people coming from svn think of branches differently. In git, a branch is simply a pointer to a commit.

So let's verify that claim to see if it's true.

Remember our example repository from the last post ? We'll be using it here.

First let's create a new branch.

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

That was simple, wasn't it ? Alright, let's test our hypothesis.

 $ git log
 commit 643a353370d74c26d7cbf5c80a0d73988a75e09e (HEAD -> mybranch, master)
 Author: John Doe <johndoe@example.com>
 Date:   Thu Aug 1 19:50:45 2019 +0200

     Second commit

The commit is, of course, different because this is a different computer with a different repository from scratch. Anyway, it seems from the log message that both mybranch and master are pointing to same commit SHA. Technically they are pointing to HEAD.

Now let's continue and add a new commit.

 $ echo "" >> README.md
 $ git add README.md
 $ git commit -m "Adding an empty line"
 [mybranch b30f4e0] Adding an empty line
  1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)

After this last commit, let's check the log

 $ git log
 commit b30f4e0fa8f3b5c9f041c9ad1be982b2fed80851 (HEAD -> mybranch)
 Author: John Doe <johndoe@example.com>
 Date:   Thu Aug 1 20:28:05 2019 +0200

      Adding an empty line

 commit 643a353370d74c26d7cbf5c80a0d73988a75e09e (master)
 Author: John Doe <johndoe@example.com>
 Date:   Thu Aug 1 19:50:45 2019 +0200

      Second commit

From reading the output of log, we can see that the master branch points to a different commit than mybranch.

To visualize this, let's look at it in a different way.

 $ git log --graph --oneline --all
 * b30f4e0 (HEAD -> mybranch) Adding an empty line
 * 643a353 (master) Second commit

What the above suggests is that our two branches have different contents at this stage. In other words, if I switch back to the master branch what do you think we will find in README.md ?

 $ git checkout master
 Switched to branch 'master'
 $ cat README.md
 # Example

 This is an example repository.
 This repository is trying to give you a hands on experience with git to complement the post.
 $

And if we switch back to mybranch.

 $ git checkout mybranch
 Switched to branch 'mybranch'
 $ cat README.md
 # Example

 This is an example repository.
 This repository is trying to give you a hands on experience with git to complement the post.

 $

Let's add another commit to make easier to see the changes than an empty line.

 $ echo "Let's add a line to mybranch." >> README.md
 $ git add README.md
 $ git commit -m "Adding more commits to mybranch"
 [mybranch f25dd5d] Adding more commits to mybranch
  1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)

Now let's check the tree again.

 $ git log --graph --oneline --all
 * f25dd5d (HEAD -> mybranch) Adding more commits to mybranch
 * b30f4e0 Adding an empty line
 * 643a353 (master) Second commit

Let's also check the difference between our master branch and mybranch.

 $ git diff master mybranch
 diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
 index b4734ad..f07e71e 100644
 --- a/README.md
 +++ b/README.md
 @@ -2,3 +2,5 @@

  This is an example repository.
  This repository is trying to give you a hands on experience with git to complement the post.
 +
 +Let's add a line to mybranch.

The + suggests an addition and - suggests a deletion of a line. As we can see from the + shown before the two lines added to the README.md file, mybranch has these additions.

You can read more about git branches in the git documentation page.

What is merging ?

That's all fine so far, but how do I get these changes from mybranch to the master branch ?

The answer to that is also as easy as all the steps taken so far. git merges from a branch you specify to the branch you are currently on.

 $ # Checking which branch we are on
 $ git branch
   master
 * mybranch
 $ # We are on mybranch and we need to put these changes into master
 $ # First we need to move to our master branch
 $ git checkout master
 Switched to branch 'master'
 $ # Now we can merge from mybranch
 $ git merge mybranch
 Updating 643a353..f25dd5d
 Fast-forward
  README.md | 2 ++
  1 file changed, 2 insertions(+)

As we can see. The changes in mybranch have been merged into the master branch.

 $ git log
 commit f25dd5da3e6f91d117177782a5811d5086f66799 (HEAD -> master, mybranch)
 Author: John Doe <johndoe@example.com>
 Date:   Thu Aug 1 20:43:57 2019 +0200

     Adding more commits to mybranch

 commit b30f4e0fa8f3b5c9f041c9ad1be982b2fed80851
 Author: John Doe <johndoe@example.com>
 Date:   Thu Aug 1 20:28:05 2019 +0200

     Adding an empty line

 commit 643a353370d74c26d7cbf5c80a0d73988a75e09e
 Author: John Doe <johndoe@example.com>
 Date:   Thu Aug 1 19:50:45 2019 +0200

     Second commit

Merging Strategies

I'll explain to you how I like to work and my personal merging strategy. I will keep out some details as they use concepts that are more advanced than what has been discussed so far.

master branch

To me, the master branch stays always up to date with the remote master branch. In other words, I do not make commits against the master branch in the project I'm working on.

branch

If I want to work on the project, I start by updating the master branch and then branching it as we've seen before. The name of the branch is always indicative on what it holds, or what kind of work I am doing on it.

As long as I am working on my dev branch, I keep updating the master branch and then porting the changes into my dev branch. This way, at the end the code is compatible and I am testing with the latest version of the code. This is very helpful and makes merging later a breeze.

merging

After my work is done, I push my branch to the remote server and ask for the maintainer of the project to merge my changes into the master branch after reviewing it, of course. To explain this in a very simple manner, all that mumbo jumpo talk previously simply means someone else did the merge into master.

Conclusion

In this post, I talked about what are branches. We went ahead and worked a little bit with branches and then mentioned merging. At the end of the post I talked a bit about my merging strategy.

In the next post, I will be talking about remotes.