Life Beyond Fife

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The outer cycle

The outer most cycle represents a full development task loop beginning with getting the latest code from the origin repo; developing, say, a new product feature or bug fix; and ending with creating a pull request for your changes so that they're available to your development collaborators. Your feature may take only a few hours in which case the cycle completes quickly, however, out of consideration to your colleagues if nothing else, you should break your changes into small, standalone merges that do not take more than a week to develop. The git commands First checkout the master branch. $...

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Setup: the origin repo

When beginning to collaborate on a coding project using git, there are a couple of steps to create a local copy of the repo. Assuming you're joining a project that's already underway, use the git clone command to create your own local copy. In the same way that master is the default name for the main development branch, origin is the default name for your shared repo server. $ git clone https://your-repo-hosting.com/repo-name.git You now have the master branch on your local machine, with a link to http://your-repo-hosting.com/repo-name.git as your origin repo. To verify the origin repo is what you expect,...

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Cycles: the introduction

There are three development activities that cycle repeatedly within each other. They can be done as often as you like but we introduce a best practice upper bound of one hour, one day, and one week for each. These durations are of course advisory and can be ignored, but discipline in this regard will reward you with increased productivity and more streamlined cooperation. Alongside each cycle there are associated git commands that allow you to complete the required steps. The Three Cycles The outer most cycle represents a full development task loop beginning with getting the latest code from the...

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Never, EVER, push to master

Every repo, after an initial commit, starts by default with one branch and that is named master. It's the branch that everyones' branches get merged into and is largely the one from which developers pull changes. This makes it the most important – it's the one that contains the latest changes, it's the one that's used by the build servers to power continuous integration. Therefore it needs special protection to ensure nothing bad happens to it. Tools and process Firstly, there should be safety measures in whatever git server hosting you use (GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket) to protect a master branch...

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branch off, commit, and merge back

Once your changes have been carefully reviewed and staged, they're ready to be committed to the active branch. Include a brief sentence detailing what the change is. $ git commit -m "Revolutionise e-commerce by making the book button slightly bluer." Going back to your roots Your branch is ready to share with colleagues and collaborators by pushing it back to the origin repo (see Part 14 - Setup: the origin repo). But with all this branching off everywhere, how on earth are we all going to work on one consistent codebase? Simple, we merge the changes of the branch back...

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review with status, diff and log

Once you have staged all the changes you want to make (see add, remove and reset), you're ready to commit those changes to the active branch. This is how you collect all your development activity into a single atomic unit that delivers one feature, or fixes one bug etc. and passes all unit and integration tests, naturally. But before rushing in, review the changes you want to make using the helpful git commands log, status and diff. Right branch The log command gives a history of the branch you're working on an shows the previous commits that have been made...

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