7 ways to make Git work better for your team

   2019-08-06   2 min read      hello world      git

This article is a continuation of my git workflow.

As your teams grow or shrink, there are practices that you can do with git that can make knowledge transfer more comfortable. Here is a list of things that you can do to make that process easier.

1. Branch from master
2. Only keep branches that are actively worked on
3. Branches should be relatively short-lived
4. Merge master to your branch regularly if it exists longer than a few days. Doing this helps to avoid merge conflicts later
5. Periodically remove branches that have been merged to master. Automate it if you can
6. If your branch is related to work tracked in a system (Jira, Monday, etc.), consider including that system number along with the human-friendly description
7. Use pull requests when merging branches to master to share knowledge with team members. And perhaps catch something overlooked.

Below are some git commands to help make these things easier.

Description	Command
branch from master	git checkout master; git checkout -b jira-1234-something-awesome
merge master to your branch	git checkout jira-1234-something-awesome; git fetch --all; git merge master
Removing branches merged to master	See my git workflow post
Submit Pull request	hub pull-request -r codeninja,techgoddes -b master

Additional Notes

• The hub-pull request line is because I use the hub tool provided by Github.
• The -b is unnecessary on the hub pull request for this use case. I offer it here to demo how you could submit a pull request to another a branch by name
• None of this is written in stone. Pick and choose what works for you

Disagree? Did I miss something? Comment below or you can Tweet me with #git .
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