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Mobify Branching Strategy
This document represents Mobify's current branching and release strategy. It provides a brief overview of the two release models that we use: release deployment and continuous deployment.
Each workflow tries to make things as simple as possible while still being flexible enough to work for all teams at Mobify.
At the end of each document is a list of common scenarios you will encounter and how Mobify's branching strategies apply.
What is the purpose of this document?
As Mobify continues to grow and expand its operations globally, consistency across all teams and partners is a key focus. The more aligned all Mobify projects are, the more productive everyone will be.
This repository and its documentation outline:
- How we develop features
- When and how we create a release
- What to do when a hot fix is required
- Anything else related to our branching strategy
This document is not...
Written in stone. Pull requests welcome! We will iterate on this document based on feedback.
The one true way to work on projects. There are edgecases and this document does not intent to answer them all.
A guide on deployment or workflows. Build deployment and workflow strategies on top of these branching models in a way that best fits your team.
Project Types
Depending on the type of project, one of two branching strategies is used:
Continuous Deployment
Use this strategy for projects where features get deployed as soon as they're ready.
Release Deployment
Use this strategy for projects where features get bundled into a release and then deployed together.
Branch Naming
Branch naming is left mostly up to the discretion of the person creating the branch
with a few exceptions. master and develop are always named exactly that. When a
feature/bugfix is related to a JIRA ticket we prefer that the branch name start with
the ticket number (eg. hyb-545-add-headerbar). Hotfix and release branches should
follow a pattern defined in the project type documents (ie. release-vX.Y.Z or
(eg. hotfix-hyb-244-fix-db-connection-code), but feature and bugfix branches
do not need a common prefix (ie. feature-*).
Branch names should use dashes to separate words of the name and should avoid any uppercase letters.
Other than that, choose names that are descriptive and concise. You don't need a branch name that is a novel because most branches should be relatively short-lived (hours to days, not weeks).
Git @ Mobify
Mobify uses git (specifically Github) for all source control. Git is a very flexible tool and we have adopted some patterns when using git specifically at Mobify. Think of it as the git equivalent of "Javascript - The Good Parts." :)
Updating branches
** Important **
Git always works on a local copy of a repository. As a result, whenever you do any operations that involve multiple branches (eg. merge) be sure to update both branches before performing the operation.
git pull
Git provides a single command to update your local branch with changes from a remote.
git pull is this command. Most of the time it does exactly what you want without
any problems, but you should know that git pull is really git fetch followed
by git merge. So when you pull from a remote, you're actually updating the remote
tracking branch (eg. origin/mybranch) and then merging that into your local
branch mybranch.
It's good to know that this happens under the hood. Some people prefer to do the
git fetch and git merge operations separately. Most of the time git pull will
do what you want and is an acceptable way to update your local branch with changes
from remote.
Protected Branches
GitHub recently added Protected branches. Protected branches:
- Can't be force pushed
- Can't be deleted
- Can't have changes merged into them until required status checks pass
master and develop branches should always be protected. These protected branches
should never be directly committed to. They should only be updated through PR merges.
Projects that have continuous integration with a service such as CircleCI should
have their master and develop (if applicable) branches protected by a status
check requiring CircleCI builds to pass before changes can be merged.
Anti-Patterns
After reading all of the above, none of the Anti-Patterns should come as a surprise.