Git Branch Basics

Basics of Git Branching

The ability to easily branch is one of the best features of Git. Creating branches in other version control systems can be expensive in terms of space and processing requirements. Git branching is efficient. So users are more prone to use branches in Git.

A Branching Workflow

Let’s suppose you started a new project called myvideogame. It has a single branch. The default name of the initial branch in Git is called master. It’s automatically created.  Let’s create the myvideogame Git repository.

You have created an empty Git repository. Let’s add our design.txt file with some text in it.

Lets add some more changes:

If you check the history, you’ll find:

If you check Git status and all branches that were created (using the command: git branch -a), you see:

Currently, you have the following situation:

You have made two commits in the master branch.

Let’s suppose, you have found bugs in your game testing, but you don’t want to address the issue in the master branch because you don’t want to mess with the original design yet. So you can create a new branch called bugfix:

Now if you check all branches:

Now you have created a new branch called bugfix. The situation can be visualized as this:

However, the star(*) beside the master branch means that you are still in the master. If you make changes it will still go into the master branch. You can use the checkout command to change branches:

You can check which branch you are using with  status or “branch -a” command:

Now, let’s fix the bug:

You have created a situation like this:

The master branch doesn’t have the C2 change. You can easily verify this by checking the history of the two branches.

First, the history of the bugfix branch:

Then you can switch to master branch and check its history:

You can see the master branch doesn’t have the changes from the bugfix branch.

You can always create a new branch from the current branch you are located in. Suppose, you want to create another branch that will contain experimental features. You can create the branch from master and add experimental features to it:

If you check the history of your experimental branch, you’ll see:

You will notice that you don’t have the C2 commit which was created in bugfix branch. Because experimental branch is created from master branch, it doesn’t see the bugfix changes. You have the following situation:

Conclusion

Congratulations! You have learned how to branch.

Git branches are easy and fast to make. It’s one of the reasons behind Git’s popularity. If you want to become a proficient Git user, you need to become proficient in Git branching.

Further Study:

https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Git-Branching-Basic-Branching-and-Merging