gitgit-flow

How to manage hotfixes across main and dev branches in Git

I have two branches: main for the old release and dev for the latest release. I need to manage hotfixes effectively across these branches. Specifically, I need to:

What is the best approach to ensure that hotfixes applied to main are also incorporated into dev?

Additionally, although now i have same codebase in both branches, how should I handle the situation where the dev branch is behind main due to differences in commit history from merge requests? What are the best practices for synchronizing these branches?

I expect to be able to merge hotfix to dev and main. If there is a better approach, please suggest it.

Solution

  • From the description of your branching strategy, you aren't really using Git Flow, since it doesn't appear that you're using release branches and it's unclear how you're getting features from your dev branch into main. But since you tagged git-flow, there are same concepts from it that will help you here:

    1. Work on dev (akin to develop in Git Flow), and get it stable enough that everything on dev can be deployed to production. In order to do this you need to stop development of new features (code freeze) at some point and just focus on bug fixes. One of the main reasons Git Flow was created is to avoid having code freezes, and this is solved by cutting a release branch from dev, and then you can have bug fixes worked on release while new development continues simultaneously on dev.
    2. When you're ready to deploy to production, deploy the latest build from your stable branch (which is either dev if you did a code freeze, or release if you created it). Then merge that stable branch into main. (Git Flow recommends using --no-ff for this merge so the first parent of history shows you exactly what was deployed to production each time.) After merging release or dev into main, merge main back into dev.
    3. When you have a hotfix, merge hotfix into main when it's deployed, and then merge main into release if it's pending, or dev if you don't have a pending release. Specifically to your scenario: if you only have dev and main, after merging a hotfix into main, merge main back into dev.

    Takeaways: