A Git Workflow

The goal of this workflow is to have a cleaner history, which makes things easier to review when you go back in time. In general, there's nothing too complex, but it includes rebasing, which if not done right and with care can cause loss of work. It's gotten a lot better and there are ways to still recover the work, so I am less worried, but the warning is still there.

One way of explaining rebases is thinking of them as .patch files. Imagine each of the commits you are rebasing is a .patch file and you apply that patch file one after the other on top of a new codebase. Each patch will then create a new commit.

Normally, the .patch applies cleanly, but as you have probably encountered, it sometimes fails to apply properly. This is when you will put on your surgeon's cap and work carefully. It's pretty much the same as sorting out merge conflicts, but a merge commit is more easily revertible. The other problem with rebases is that they might require you to force-push, which is again dangerous, but in this workflow you would only be force-pushing to the feature branch you are working on and about to merge, so it's not a huge deal.

Tip

All the git configurations mentioned in this workflow are available in example.gitconfig. Copy the settings to your ~/.gitconfig or run the equivalent git config --global commands.

• Pull rebase keeping merges
• Production/Staging branches
• Pull requests/feature branches
  • --force-with-lease and --force-if-includes
• Rebasing
• Pull request review
• Hotfixes to production
• Optional squashing
• Commit messages

Pull rebase keeping merges

TL;DR

• git pull --rebase-merges

Tip

You can configure this as your default pull behavior with git config --global pull.rebase merges

This will fetch whatever is in the remote and reapply your local commits on top of the new code. This eliminates unnecessary remote merge commits.

The merges option keeps your local merge commits, if any. This prevents accidentally dropping those on the main/staging branches.

Because this is just a rebase of your local commits, no force push is necessary.

Conflicts can happen, so you can either fix them, commit, and continue the rebase (git rebase --continue) or abort it (git rebase --abort) and go back to pulling normally if you want to be cautious: git pull --merge.

Production/Staging branches

Staging should at all times be deployable to Production.

TL;DR

• git checkout main
• git pull
• git merge staging --ff-only

Tip

You can configure this globally with git config --global branch.main.mergeOptions --ff-only (sets the default merge strategy for the main branch).

A common scheme is having at least one production branch (main) and a staging branch (stage, staging, develop) that's always where code lands before being merged onto the production branch.

Since the history between staging and production should ideally always be the same, having a merge commit on main from staging makes no sense. To avoid this, you should normally merge with --ff-only, which performs a fast-forward. If this fails, it's because the history of the production branch has diverged and needs to be fixed accordingly.

Pull requests/feature branches

Assumes PR/feature branches are created from a staging branch named staging.

PR/feature branches are short-lived; they must be removed once the work is merged.

TL;DR - when you are ready to merge the PR/feature branch

• git checkout staging
• git pull
• git checkout feature/branch
• git rebase staging (can cause conflicts which you'll need to fix)
• git push --force-with-lease --force-if-includes
• git checkout staging
• git merge --no-ff feature/branch
• git push
• git push origin :feature/branch (removes remote branch)
• git branch -d feature/branch (removes local branch)

Tip

You can configure safer force-pushing as the default with git config --global push.useForceIfIncludes true (automatically adds --force-if-includes when --force-with-lease is used).

Note: there's currently no configuration to make --force-with-lease the default for pushes.

Tip

You can also configure no-fast-forward merges as the default with git config --global merge.ff false (sets --no-ff as the default merge strategy for all branches).

Note: we've already configured main to use --ff-only when merging into it, which is more restrictive and takes precedence for that specific branch.

If we merge PR/feature branches as-is, multiple PR/feature branches can have commits happening at different times. While this is acceptable, it gives a much clearer history graph if we rebase first. Furthermore, rebasing removes the merge commits that we might have accumulated while keeping the feature branch up to date, which are not important for the final history.

This should be done as the last step just before merging the branch into staging, which is especially important if the feature branch is being worked on by multiple developers.

You should push your rebased code to the remote PR/feature branch with git push --force-with-lease --force-if-includes just before merging.

You can then check out your staging branch and merge your PR/feature branch with git merge --no-ff feature/branch. The --no-ff flag creates a merge commit for the PR/feature branch so that the history remains accessible.

Note

PR/feature branches should be short-lived, so make sure you remove both the remote (git push origin :feature/branch) and local PR/feature branch (git branch -d feature/branch).**

--force-with-lease and --force-if-includes

It's important to use --force-with-lease together with --force-if-includes when force-pushing rebased branches.

--force-with-lease alone can be defeated by background auto-fetches (common in IDEs like LazyGit, VS Code, etc.) that update your remote-tracking branch without you realizing it. When this happens, --force-with-lease thinks you've seen the latest remote changes and allows the force-push, potentially overwriting others' work.

--force-if-includes adds an extra safety check: it uses your reflog to verify you've actually integrated remote changes into your local branch before allowing the force-push.

References:

• jesseduffield/lazygit#1668 (comment)
• jesseduffield/lazygit#1668 (comment)
• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65837109/when-should-i-use-git-push-force-if-includes

Rebasing

When rebasing branches that contain merge commits (such as rebasing staging itself), use --rebase-merges to preserve the existing merge commits from feature branches. This is a safer rebasing approach that maintains the merge structure rather than linearizing all commits.

git rebase --rebase-merges main

This is particularly useful when you need to rebase a staging branch that contains multiple feature branch merges and you want to preserve that merge history in the rebased result.

Note: You can use --no-rebase-merges to explicitly disable this behavior if needed.

Tip

You can configure this as the default rebase behavior with git config --global rebase.rebaseMerges true (sets --rebase-merges as the default for all rebase operations).

Pull request review

Here's a useful emoji code you can use for verbose code reviews: https://gist.github.com/pfleidi/4422a5cac5b04550f714f1f886d2feea

Hotfixes to production

To be documented. The most important element is keeping main/staging with exactly the same history.

Optional squashing

I am not a fan of squashing, but when used with common sense it can be helpful. If your feature branch is full of small commits that touch very few files/lines, it makes more sense to squash them than to merge the whole history.

TL;DR

• git checkout staging
• git merge feature/branch --squash (there's no commit here yet, but changes are staged)
• git commit -m "JIRA-1234: something done" (JIRA-1234 or whatever references your PM tool of choice)
• git push
• git push origin :feature/branch (removes remote branch)
• git branch -d feature/branch (removes local branch)

Commit messages

Text from https://github.blog/2011-09-06-shiny-new-commit-styles/:

Always include a reference to the task (Jira, Trello, ClickUp) in the summary or the description.

If at all possible, look for integration between the PM tool and the commit.

Capitalized, short (50 chars or less) summary

More detailed explanatory text, if necessary. Wrap it to about 72 characters or
so. In some contexts, the first line is treated as the subject of an email and
the rest of the text as the body. The blank line separating the summary from the
body is critical (unless you omit the body entirely); tools like rebase can get
confused if you run the two together.

Write your commit message in the present tense: "Fix bug" and not "Fixed bug."
This convention matches up with commit messages generated by commands like `git
merge` and `git revert`.

Further paragraphs come after blank lines.

- Bullet points are okay, too
- Typically a hyphen or asterisk is used for the bullet, preceded by a single
  space, with blank lines in between, but conventions vary here
- Use a hanging indent

Tip

I find 50 chars or less too short. I normally use the amazing GitSavvy Sublime Text plugin that has a sensible warning at +20 characters making 70 characters a good summary line length.

Furthermore, using conventional commits can create a very nice changelog from commit messages and also encourages you to scope your commits better.

<type>[optional scope]: <description>

[optional body]

[optional footer(s)]

From the Conventional Commits specification:

The commit contains the following structural elements, to communicate intent to the consumers of your library:

• fix: a commit of the type fix patches a bug in your codebase (this correlates with PATCH in Semantic Versioning).
• feat: a commit of the type feat introduces a new feature to the codebase (this correlates with MINOR in Semantic Versioning).
• BREAKING CHANGE: a commit that has a footer BREAKING CHANGE:, or appends a ! after the type/scope, introduces a breaking API change (correlating with MAJOR in Semantic Versioning). A BREAKING CHANGE can be part of commits of any type.
• types other than fix: and feat: are allowed, for example @commitlint/config-conventional (based on the Angular convention) recommends build:, chore:, ci:, docs:, style:, refactor:, perf:, test:, and others.
• footers other than BREAKING CHANGE: <description> may be provided and follow a convention similar to git trailer format.

Additional types are not mandated by the Conventional Commits specification, and have no implicit effect in Semantic Versioning (unless they include a BREAKING CHANGE). A scope may be provided to a commit's type, to provide additional contextual information and is contained within parentheses, e.g., feat(parser): add ability to parse arrays.

Other useful readings:

• https://tbaggery.com/2008/04/19/a-note-about-git-commit-messages.html
• https://markus.oberlehner.net/blog/git-the-pedantic-way/