Branching

• a Branch is something like a “copy” of your current folder where you can work on new features or fixes without affecting the current “main” folder.
• In this new branch, you can experiment safely without braking anything for the rest of your collaborators :) Specially useful for coding.
• It allows you to work on new features without affecting the main code.
• Helps keeping the main branch stable!!

Creating a new branch

Let’s say we want to update the guacamole recipe, which we know Alfredo is currently working on.

To create a new branch, called “new_guacamole” there are two possible ways

$ git checkout -b new-guacamole

or

$ git branch new-guacamole
$ git checkout new-guacamole

To see local (remote add flag -r) branches,

$ git branch

Commiting in new branch

If you make changes in the new branch and commit them, they will not modify the main branch of the repository, they will follow a new “timeline” of the repository, which started in an initial “node” commit, but then separated (like branches in a tree) into two working lines.

Merging

Let’s say you are satisfied with the new guacamole recipe, and you want to share it back to Alfredo. There are two possible ways.

• We can directly merge the branch new-guacamole to main, and push the changes to the remote repository.

$ git checkout main
$ git merge new-guacamole

• We can push our current branch to the local repository to let Alfredo see it. If he is satisfied with it, we can include the new-guacamole branch to the main branch by performing a pull request from new_guacamole to main.

Merge conflicts (tough!)

Sometimes, Git can’t automatically merge changes because the same lines of a file were modified differently in two branches. This is called a merge conflict.

In this case, git will notify you and you’ll need to manually edit the files to resolve the conflict.

detached head

• We had seen you can also checkout a commit instead of a branch. That is, you can go to that point of the history of the folder. In this case, are are in a detached HEAD state, because any commit made here will not be associated to any named branch anymore. You are now directly referencing to a commit.

• If you are in a detached HEAD state, create a new branch and switch to it! (This provides a new name reference for further commits)

$ git checkout -b my-new-branch

END

Content

01. Intro to Git

02. Setting up Git

03. Creating a repository

04. Tracking changes

05. Exploring History

06. Ignoring things

07. Remotes in GitHub

08. Collaborating

09. Branching and Merging