Why branching and merging

View all e-books. View all case-studies. View all events. View all webinar recordings. View all Experts Talks. Last updated: 25 February, Merge Requests for Advanced Collaboration Merge requests or, as they are known in Git, pull requests offer developers a way to notify others that their work on a branch is done. How to use merge requests? In general, merge requests will follow this simple process: A developer is assigned a task or feature , and a branch to work on.

They will start to build the feature working on this branch. Once work is completed, the developer will request a merge of their branch to the main development branch within codeBeamer. The team reviews the feature code built, comments on it, or changes it any way they see fit. Try codebeamer X now Start your online trial of codebeamer X. Search content. Tag cloud Sort tags by: Post count.

Review us on. Check out Option 4 below for an example. These examples will be using PowerShell 7 on a Windows 10 system; however, you can use any terminal that supports Git commands. To create a branch, use the git branch command followed by the name of the branch. After making the branch, use git branch again to view available branches.

Notice that creating a branch this way does not automatically switch to the new branch. Git uses an asterisk and a different colored font to identify which branch is active. This designation represents the HEAD pointer showing which branch is active. If you want to create a branch and checkout the branch simultaneously, use the git checkout command. The switch -b specifies the name of the branch. You can create a branch from a previous commit on an existing branch.

Remember, a commit is just a snapshot in time of the files in a repository. You create a branch from a commit if you want to work on a specific snapshot of the files. Before creating the branch, you need the SHA-1 identifier of the commit. To find the identifier, use the git log command to view previous commits. Each commit will have a complete SHA-1 hash as the identifier. However, you only need the first few characters to identify the commit. Next, use the same git branch command from Option 1 but append the commit identifier at the end.

This example is using 40b4d7 from the second commit as the identifier. Note the HEAD designator is on the main branch, which is the active branch. Both point to the same snapshot as each branch has not had additional commits made to each one since creation. If you use branches dedicated to hotfixes or features, you create branches from these other branches to work on the item.

Creating a branch from another branch is no different from creating from the main branch. You just need to specify the name of the other branch as the starting point.

This example shows creating the feature4 branch from the develop branch. While you have a local copy of a repository to work with, so do other developers. These developers will have branches they are working on, and they can push their branches to a remote repository. You can pull or download specific branches from a remote repository to use on your system. In a central repository hosted in GitHub, notice the branches available are the same ones on the local system main, feature1, feature2, and hotfix1.

However, another developer named Maggie has a branch for hotfix2 that is not on the local system. Maggie requests your assistance working on a hotfix, so you need to download this branch to your system. To retrieve the branch from the remote repository, use git pull against the origin and specify the name of the branch. However, you can check out the branch and begin working on this new branch.

Merging takes your branch changes and implements them into the main branch. Depending on the commit history, Git performs merges two ways: fast-forward and three-way merge. We first encounter the command in Switching Branches along with the git branch command. We see how to use it to start tracking branches with the --track flag in Tracking Branches.

We go into closer detail on its relationship with git reset in Reset Demystified. The git merge tool is used to merge one or more branches into the branch you have checked out. It will then advance the current branch to the result of the merge.

The git merge command was first introduced in Basic Branching. We went over a lot about the merge process and command, including the -Xignore-space-change command and the --abort flag to abort a problem merge in Advanced Merging. We learned how to verify signatures before merging if your project is using GPG signing in Signing Commits. The git mergetool command simply launches an external merge helper in case you have issues with a merge in Git.

We mention it quickly in Basic Merge Conflicts and go into detail on how to implement your own external merge tool in External Merge and Diff Tools. The git log command is used to show the reachable recorded history of a project from the most recent commit snapshot backwards. It is also often used to show differences between two or more branches at the commit level.

This command is used in nearly every chapter of the book to demonstrate the history of a project. We introduce the command and cover it in some depth in Viewing the Commit History. There we look at the -p and --stat option to get an idea of what was introduced in each commit and the --pretty and --oneline options to view the history more concisely, along with some simple date and author filtering options.