Gitflow Workflow | Atlassian Git Tutorial

You can think of maintenance branches as ad hoc release branches that work directly with main.

Hotfix branches are a lot like release branches and feature branches except they're based on main instead of develop.

Using a dedicated branch to prepare releases makes it possible for one team to polish the current release while another team continues working on features for the next release.

Creating this branch starts the next release cycle, so no new features can be added after this point—only bug fixes, documentation generation, and other release-oriented tasks should go in this branch.

When a feature is complete, it gets merged back into develop. Features should never interact directly with main.

Once it's ready to ship, the release branch gets merged into main and tagged with a version number. In addition, it should be merged back into develop, which may have progressed since the release was initiated.

Once develop has acquired enough features for a release (or a predetermined release date is approaching), you fork a release branch off of develop.

Each new feature should reside in its own branch, which can be pushed to the central repository for backup/collaboration. But, instead of branching off of main, feature branches use develop as their parent branch.

These long-lived feature branches require more collaboration to merge and have a higher risk of deviating from the trunk branch. They can also introduce conflicting updates.

project. The main branch stores the official release history, and the develop branch serves as an integration branch for features.

Under this model, developers create a feature branch and delay merging it to the main trunk branch until the feature is complete.

Gitflow is an alternative Git branching model that involves the use of feature branches and multiple primary branches.

The overall flow of Gitflow is:

A develop branch is created from main A release branch is created from develop Feature branches are created from develop When a feature is complete it is merged into the develop branch When the release branch is done it is merged into develop and main If an issue in main is detected a hotfix branch is created from main Once the hotfix is complete it is merged to both develop and main

As soon as the fix is complete, it should be merged into both main and develop (or the current release branch), and main should be tagged with an updated version number.

It's important to merge back into develop because critical updates may have been added to the release branch and they need to be accessible to new features.