For a project with multiple developers where one developer controls what goes to production: This developer pushes from his own branch <his_branch>, and everyone has to incorporate their changes into his branch. His branch contains his changes and the changes other developers' changes. How do I make sure I pull down his most recent branch and work from it on my local. I have tried so many different commands and approaches, with the most recent being:
Git clone the repository (done when I started the project)
Fetch his branch
Create a working branch <my_branch> from <his_branch>
git checkout -b my_branch origin/his_branch
(I get errors)
Create my branch on remote
Fetch all including my new branch (but my new branch contains code from Master)
Access my branch locally, work on it, commit changes, create a pull request for him to review
(I don't have his latest code) and there are many conflicts to resolve
I am new to GitHub and can't find a fairly straightforward answer to this question. Typically people who answer this question, make sure they provide the most complicated solution to follow to try to impress with their GitHub acumen.
Can someone provide a straightforward answer without snark, condescension, or derision?
Related
We have a GitHub project (master), every member of the team have a Fork of the project into their own repository.
Once a developer fixed something he create a new branch inside his local forked repo and commit that into remote repository and after that they request a Pull Request so that change go into the master reposiroty.
We publish to production "manually" once a week but we have had issues in production because accidentaly developer had committed to their forked repository and other developer with higher privilegies accept the changes and merge that into master repo, then someone else publish to production and he didnt knew that those new changes didn't passed to QA process.
So, what I want is to create like a Production Repository, so when we have the code in master repo that we know is stable and working then create like a Production branch so if by mistake something is commited and merge into master repo then the code for production publish is not affected.
Any clue or best practice to do this?
Not sure I'm understanding the question correctly, but you can add as many remote repositories as you like. There is a section in the Pro Git book called Working with Remotes that discusses this thoroughly.
In my experience, separating development and production code is typically done with a branching model such as git-flow. You can create separate repositories to solve this problem if you like, but doing so is unnecessary. This is because if developer A submits a PR that's merged by developer B, then developer C will get a non-fast-forward error when they try to commit upstream. This is called a subversion-style workflow. Per the docs:
Git will not allow you to push if someone has pushed since the last time you fetched, so a centralized model where all developers push to the same server works just fine.
If commits to the upstream branch are not being fetched and merged appropriately before pushing, then someone has likely taken it upon themselves to rewrite history.
Your git workflow is good enough to take care of this issue.
First, to fix the issue:
Treat unintended code push as bug and fix it as you would fix any other bug. Best person to perform this activity would be the developer who pushed that code. Developer can just fix it in their fork and submit a pull request. Try not to add any other unrelated code with this pull request.
About Production Branch or Repo:
I don't think you need another Production Branch/Repo (you already have one). As it happened with your current PROD repo, accidental code push can make it to new Branch/Repo too.
Instead use tags/releases feature in GitHub. Whenever state of code in master repo is prod ready, tag it and use the tag for production publish.
Caveat: I am fairly new to both git and GitHub.
So, in my current setup, my team uses git flow Hotfixes (usually started and finished by a graphical tool such as GitKraken or IntelliJ) to make changes that have to be merged into two branches and pushed upstream in both. So for example the flow would be:
Pull latest from master
Start hotfix
Commit changes
Merge hotfix branch into both master and develop and push both upstream
We're now looking at moving our code into GitHub and would like to start using Pull Requests, for a couple of reasons:
CI hooks to run tests and stuff
a place to put code-specific comments not directly related to the underlying "issue"
avoiding the need for everyone to constantly be pulling the latest master/develop to their local machine so that they can merge changes
But in the case of Hotfixes, I'm not sure what to do because I'm merging into two branches but it really is one "action" so manually creating two pull requests seems weird, particularly since step 4) in our current flow is a single click.
Is there a smart way of handling this? My ideal case would be that pushing the Merge button on the Pull Request would just merge into both, but that doesn't seem to be an available option.
As you mentioned, a Pull Request has only one target branch, so you won't be able to push the hotfix to both master and develop by merging one Pull Request.
I'm also surprised you mention your step #4 - merging the hotfix branch to both master and develop and push upstream - is one action. While there's a high chance the merge from hotfix to master won't run into merge conflicts, I can't say the same for the merge from hotfix to develop since it could have been worked on since the last deployment to production.
My recommendation would then be the following:
Create one PR from hotfix to master and have someone review it to validate the fix
Once it's merged into master, create another PR from hotfix to develop and see if you run into merge conflicts
If that's the case, resolve the merge conflicts so the PR ends up in a state to be merged, and have someone review the PR
If there's no merge conflicts, then have someone review the PR
An alternative solution, if you really want to go down the automated path, would be to leverage both GitHub webhooks and API.
The webhook would allow you to be notified when a PR is merged. You could inspect the payload to make sure that the base branch starts with hotfix/ and the target branch is master. You could then react to that event by using the API to create a new PR from the same hotfix branch to develop.
It will involve some development, and the effort might not be worth since creating a PR via the UI is still quite easy and quick.
So i have the following problem:
Back when i started programming, i FORKED a repository (using github for windows) for a browser-game. For some time now, i made stuff, did git commit and issued a pull request using the webpage.
The original author did authorize my pull request and my changes went live.
Recently, i have become an "official" author on the original repository.
So i dont want to work on my "fork" any longer but instead dev on the original.
Using github for windows, i decided to "clone" the original repo.
My github now shows my forked (AncientSion/FieryVoid) repository and the original (Aatu/FieryVoid).
Now what i would like to do is somehow "merge" my forked repo into my local clone of the original repo and from there commit to the master repo directly, that way deploying my local, not yet commited changes from my fork to the live version while at the same time getting rid of fork repository.
However, i have no idea if that works and if it does, how.
Can someone please advise ?
I don't think that the Github for Windows interface supports this, but this can definitely be done via the git bash console. This is untested, but the steps ought to be correct, since I've done something similar (identical, in fact) before. This assumes that your clone, AncientSion/FieryVoid, is up-to-date with Aatu/FieryVoid, which can be done with a pull followed by a merge, or, to avoid merge commits, with a git pull --rebase. So now you have AncientSion/FieryVoid and Aatu/FieryVoid, both present locally, with AncientSion/FieryVoid ahead of Aatu/FieryVoid by a few commits. What you need to do is pull in those commits into Aatu/FieryVoid by running the following:
cd path/to/local/clone/of/Aatu/FieryVoid
git remote add local_pull path/to/local/clone/of/AncientSion/FieryVoid
git pull local_pull master
git push origin master
Couple of assumptions:
You were working on the master branch of AncientSion/FieryVoid. If not, replace master in line 3 with your branch name.
origin is a remote that tracks the online repo Aatu/FieryVoid
I am trying to find out what would be the best way to set up egit repos for mutliple developers.
I found some arguments to set up independant repos for each developer and then the recommendation to merge the files by setting the respective external upstream repo to eg developer B in Eclipse of developer A so A can pull and merge with B. However A then needs to change the repo back to his own all the time. And switching upstream repos in the settings is quite cumbersome.
Alternatively all developers could work off the same repo in different braches - then merging would be easier since noone has to go to settings and change the upstream repo. On the other side this is also kind of "dangerous" since every developer is working on the same repo without restrictions (so I heard)
Which way is better in the long run?
In the long run, having one upstream repository is easier to manage.
Each developer can make their own branches locally.
They should agree on a common branch to push to though. It can be master, or a feature branch (if a few of them are collaborating to a specific feature).
The idea is, before each push, to pull --rebase that branch from the upstream repo in order to replay your local work (the commits you haven't pushed already) on top of upstream/branch (git pull --rebase will fetch and then rebase your local work on top of what has just been fetch).
That way, a developer will only push commits which will be merged on upstream as a fast-forward merge.
In EGit terms, that pull --rebase is configured when you create a tracking branch.
Rebase: When pulling, new changes will be fetched from upstream and the remote tracking branch will be updated. Then the current local branch will be rebased onto the updated remote tracking branch
If I fork a project that's hosted on github. Do I fork all the branches? How do I know which branch my fork is based on? In other words which branch will be downloaded to my PC?
Think of it this way:
The repo[sitory] corresponds to the collaborated work of the team across one or many branches. All contributors have their own copy of it.
Each fork of the main repo corresponds to a contributor's work. A fork is really a Github (not Git) construct to store a clone of the repo in your user account. As a clone, it will contain all the branches in the main repo at the time you made the fork.
Each branch within the fork and/or in the main repo can correspond to several kinds of things, depending on how you want to work. Each branch could refer to a version of the project but can also correspond to different channels of development, like hotfixes or experimental work.
The pull request (in the GitHub ecosystem) corresponds to the task. Every time I want to contribute an isolated finished task to the main repo, I create a pull request corresponding to the commits made in that task. These commits are pulled from either my fork or my branch to the main repo.
A commit is a set of changes to the code. This is one of the most interesting things about Git. You don't transfer files, you transfer logs of changes.
All branches on GitHub will be copied in a fork. (Obviously, this doesn’t include branches that were never pushed to GitHub in the first place.)
But a fork is a GitHub-to-GitHub operation; nothing is copied to your PC. It’s not quite the same as a Git clone. If you mean to ask “what’s copied when I clone a project?”, see the manual for git-clone(1).
Fork is a clone on the GitHub side (it clones everything).
When you are cloning a repo, you are getting the all history of said repo, with all its branches.
Even though you can in theory change the default branch of a remote repo, a clone from a GitHub repo mainly look for the master branch. Meaning to change the "default" branch a GitHub clone will get, you need to rename the master branch.
If you fork a project, you are making a copy of the whole project to your git hub account. you are not coping anything to your PC
To make a copy in your PC you have to clone it and pull all the stuff and you will got all branches & code of that project
This can be explained very well. You have a central repository at GitHub. Whenever you take a clone of it on your personal computer to do some changes, this local clone of the main repository is called a fork.
The branch is something different and is included in the fork/repo. Actually the branch is your work at different stage of development. They are created as and when required to save a set of functionalities, to give access to different users, to demonstrate the site to client, etc.
If you create a fork of a project from the Github website, you get all the branches from the upstream project.
If you clone from your newly minted fork to your local PC, you will have the origin remote on your PC pointing to the master branch of your fork on Github.
I would like to share a real life example of when we use Branches and when we use Forks
We have GitLab at our shop and sometimes we have to work on packages from a Laravel project. We normally create a branch and push changes to the branch that we have been testing in our local VM dev environment when working with the actual Laravel project.
Let's say our project is located at
https://github.com/yardpenalty/mainproject.git
Branch usage:
Lets say the branch is called It_doesnt_matter
Once we have our branch the way we want for production we then make our final push to this branch and create a merge request which then goes into UAT for testing.Once the test has went through QC the changes are merged into production.
The merge from the It_doesnt_matter branch is now pushed to the master project
at https://github.com/yardpenalty/mainproject.git
Let's say the package project is located at
https://github.com/yardpenalty/mypackage.git
Keep in mind the mainproject uses this package in production so we can't make changes by simply pushing them to this package (among other reasons). Let's say a web dev has to edit this package to make changes on production.
A simple branch wont work either because we can't see our changes without publishing the package etc.
Fork Usage:
Now is when we have to do a little bit of trickery with our package so we create a clone of the production package via a fork. The composer.json files can be updated to point to the fork which is now located at a User or Group path
So we will create a fork in https://github.com/yardpenalty/mypackage.git
and call it https://github.com/yardpenalty/yards/mypackage.git
Now we can update our composer.json file to point to this package in our "repositories":[ array like such such and away we go!
{
"type": "github",
"url": "https://github.com/yardpenalty/yard/mypackage.git"
}
]