Hi everybody, I'm trying to bring myself to use git to develop my web apps, I develop alone since I'm still learning. I was wondering if this workflow would be a good start for me. Basically I have the master branch, this would be also called the production branch were only safe and working code resides, then I could have a develop branch, this branch is were I do all my day to day work, on this branch I could be adding new features, fixes, everything as branches and I guess this new branches off develop could be merged with master? or maybe merged with develop and back to master? what would be the best solution?
Sounds like a good plan if you are working alone or with just a few coders. Personally, when working alone or with another, I use the master for production and a single source of truth. I use a develop branch for dev work. If I want to make large changes to the code base to try something out or make a large feature, I will branch off of develop. When finished with the feature, I merge to develop. Then if the feature is working fine and makes it to production-ready status, I will merge develop to master. Basically, it's whatever works best for you. Everyone has there own way of using git. If you join a project, they will have established a workflow of there own for you to use.
I develop alone (with some help from the lovely folks here of course!) and do this too... well mostly ;) sometimes I am lazy...
It really does come into it's own as soon as you have anyone else involved though and a good skill to have for when this happens! Just do it - there's a little learning curve, but the basics are pretty straightforward - it's very reassuring once you get going.
I follow the same general approach as @ejdelmonico - I think this is really common.
Once you have that going you could try several branches to work on different parts, and merge them back into develop - then you may need to learn about merge conflicts. It looks scary - but it's not really.
I just have master and then create a branch to work on new features so that I can easily get to the current production code to fix an issue. I would like to have tagged releases but cannot seem to get my head around it.
I work alone and for a long time did not see the benefit, but once I started using it, I was all in.
Github's desktop client has given me confidence in that I can review all my commits easily.I tend to get distracted when working on a feature and change something unrelated (eg changing the layout of a page even though I'm not supposed to be working on that. Using the visual client I can deselect the unrelated changes and then make a commit then reselect the remaining changed files and commit again with a new message.
This is not something I could not do from the command line but this is so much easier.
Finally, when it comes to pushing to live, I look back at the history to remind myself what areas I have been working on so that I can give those a quick visual once pushed live.
