Fundamentals Of A Git Workflow

Hello everyone! Welcome back to another article under the Fundamentals of Git series. In the previous article, I shared some of the common and Basic Git Commands You Should Know if you are hoping to continue working and using Git as your Version Control System. I also successfully completed the #2Articles1Week challenge on Hashnode (Article about my experience coming soon).

Alright then, in today's article we'll be understanding the basics of Git Workflows and the benefits of using one. So without further ado, let's dive in!

What is a Git Workflow?

When working with Git, it gives us a lot of flexibility to manage our code the way we want. But if you're collaborating with others or planning on contributing to opensource, certain rules must be followed. For example, in an opensource project consisting of 50 contributors, if all contributors used their own way of using Git to contribute, it'd be quite a mess when managing. This is where a Git Workflow comes in.

A Git Workflow is a technique for using Git to manage your work in a consistent and productive manner by encouraging developers to use Git in the most efficient and suitable way for the work. For instance, a Git Workflow might include certain procedures to follow when committing, branching and merging. This ensures that all the members of a team/part of a project follow the same workflow when collaborating or contributing to the project.

Why do I need to use a Git Workflow?

Using a Git Workflow on a personal/side project is not a must, but I'd still recommend you use at least a simple workflow, as it helps you be more organized and managed with your work and also help you easily adapt to certain workflows of a company or an opensource project in the future.

So, when is using a Git workflow crucial? A well-thought-out workflow is very highly recommended when working as a group or collaborating on a project with others. This is because, when a certain workflow is assigned/used in a project, you can always keep a clean working copy of your project by identifying code issues before they become incorporated into the larger project.

Benefits of using a Git Workflow

As I mentioned above, using a Git Workflow ensures that the members collaborating/contributing to the project are able to follow the same "way" of working with the project. This allows members of the project to build, update and fix your project in a consistent and smooth manner. This means you have the ability for better scalability, issue tracking, improve development speed, set boundaries and identify areas of improvement.

Which Git Workflow to use?

The Git Workflow you choose is purely dependent on your project, team size and team preferences. Nevertheless, here are some of the most popular and common Git Workflows, you can either pick one or mix and match to best fit your needs:

Centralized Workflow
Feature Branch Workflow
Gitflow Workflow
Forking Workflow

Note:- This list is taken from a survey by Atlassian-Bitbucket. If you want to learn more about each workflow, check out this article by them.

Thanks for reading!

Well, that's it for today's article. Thank you very much for reading! If you enjoyed reading and find this article to be useful, consider liking and sharing it with others. I'm happy to say that this is the 4th article of the series and there will be more in the future. I'm also happy to share that I participated in my first ever hackathon, if you're interested, I wrote an article introducing my project.

And as always, if you have any questions or feedback let me know in the comments down below and follow me on Twitter for more updates on my journey, tips and tricks about programming. Ciao 👋