Git strategy

expected time	requirements
30 minutes	Not a lot.

Goal: Discuss the different git strategies.

Explanation

There are many ways to work with Git. Let’s discuss a few.

One branch

This strategy tries to get all development back to a single branch, say main or master. There can be extra branches that hold active development efforts, but the intent is to bring those changes back to the default branch.

On succesful integration into the default branch, a new version is released. This basically means the released version is expected to work.

                              +--- version: 1.2.3
                             /
----+------ (master) -------+----
     \                     /
      +--- (my_branch) ---+

Benefits

• This is quite a simple strategy.
• Dead branches can be removed.
• The version indicates a usable state of the code.

Drawbacks

• No variations possible.

Multiple branches

This strategy requires a bit more maintenance; there will be multiple branches, maybe an environment will use a specific branch.

---+--- (development) ---
    \
     +--- (test) ---
      \
       +--- (acceptance) ---
        \
         +--- (production) ---

In this strategy, experiments happen in development. Once working, a merge can be done to test. When that’s working, a merge can be done to acceptance and so on.

This means production is last in line.

There can be (and likely are) multiple branches before development.

Benefits

• There can be various versions (branches) in use.
• Easy to “review” before pushing (with a “pull request” (GitHub) or “merge request” (GitLab)) to production.

Drawbacks

• There are no “stable” versions.
• This strategy may be overwhelming and required good branch-managment.
• A merge mistake can skip a branch. (development to production for example.)

Assignment

• Review the terraform network. What strategy is used here?

Questions:

1. For yourself/colleagues/company, what is the best strategy?