I'm using Git for one of my projects at the moment, and I love it.
However, because I'm the only one working on my project, the only commands I've been using are
git status
git add .
git commit -m 'message here'
git push origin master
I have pushed the project to remote a long time ago ago (I Capistrano for deployment), and all is working great.
Now I want to change the design of the site, but keep the logic intact. I'm guessing I need to create a new branch (let's call it newdesign
) for that.
What I'm wondering, though, is this: if I'm working on the newdesign
branch, and I see a bug in the master
branch, how can I fix the bug on master
and then integrate that bugfix in the newdesign
branch, so that the latter be kept up to date with the actual logic?
This is a classic case in which you can take advantage of Git branches. Here is the workflow you should use.
Let's say you've created a develop
branch stemming from master
and you've made a few commits on that branch:
Suddenly, you realise that there is a bug on master
, a bug that you need to fix quickly. Instead of working directly off of master
, you should create a short-lived bug-fix branch, to isolate the bug-fixing task from your master
branch:
git checkout master
git checkout -b bugfix
After making one commit (or more) on the bugfix
branch to fix the problem,
you should make sure that everything works as it should (run tests, etc.). When you're happy with the state of your code on bugfix
, merge it into master
:
git checkout master
git merge bugfix
At that stage, you can push your (now fixed) master
branch to remote, and delete the bugfix
branch:
git push origin master
git branch -d bugfix
Now, to integrate the latest changes on master
into develop
, you basically have two options.
Merge master
into develop
, by running:
git checkout develop
git merge master
Alternatively, rebase develop
on top of master
, by running:
git checkout develop
git rebase master
In either case, your develop
branch will now contain the fix, and you can resume work on develop
.