A successful Git branching model

Published January 20th, 2010 Tagged as git, development

Great article describing a solid Git workflow. It suggests doing all development in a separate develop branch, keeping master only for production-ready code. The develop branch is merged back in to master when it gets to a stable state, anything that gets merged in to master is tagged as a release.

Three main other types of branch are used:

"Feature branches" are used to develop individual features for upcoming or distant releases; these branch off and merge back into develop.
For preparing releases (last-minute bug fixes, etc) a release branch is used - from this point on, no major features will be added, and the develop branch will be used for development on the next release.
If an existing release needs an urgent fix, a hotfix branch will be created from the last tag on master. When the bug is fixed, this branch will be merged back in to master, and the new release will be tagged.