git-flow

A collection of Git extensions to provide high-level repository operations for Vincent Driessen's branching model.

Main difference in the flow

Finishing feature and hotfix branches will create pull requests instead of merge into the respective dev and master branches.

Getting started

For the best introduction to get started with git flow, please read Jeff Kreeftmeijer's blog post:

http://jeffkreeftmeijer.com/2010/why-arent-you-using-git-flow/

Or have a look at one of these screen casts:

• A short introduction to git-flow (by Mark Derricutt)
• On the path with git-flow (by Dave Bock)

Installing git-flow

Configure github credentials

$ git config --global user.name "username" 
$ git config --global user.email "[email protected]"

Manual installation

$ git clone --recursive https://[email protected]/nityaoberoi/gitflow.git

Then, you can install git-flow, using:

$ sudo make install

If you had previously installed gitflow via brew, please replace it by moving this directory to: $ sudo mv gitflow/ /path/to/original/gitflow/

By default, git-flow will be installed in /usr/local. To change the prefix where git-flow will be installed, simply specify it explicitly, using:

$ sudo make prefix=/opt/local install

Or simply point your PATH environment variable to your git-flow checkout directory.

Force initialization

$ git-flow init -f

Storing git credentials for creating pull requests

# Temporarily cache credentials for 1 hour
$ git config --global credential.helper 'cache --timeout 3600'

# ... or permanently store them in ~/.git-credentials
$ git config --global credential.helper store	

# If you're using OSX, and used brew to install git, you can store credentials in your keychain
$ git config --global credential.helper osxkeychain

Installation note:
git-flow depends on the availability of the command line utility getopt, which may not be available in your Unix/Linux environment. Please use your favorite package manager to install getopt. For Cygwin, install the util-linux package to get getopt. If you use apt-get as your install manager, the package name is opt.

Integration with your shell

For those who use the Bash or ZSH shell, please check out the excellent work on the git-flow-completion project by bobthecow. It offers tab-completion for all git-flow subcommands and branch names.

FAQ

See the FAQ section of the project Wiki.

Please help out

This project is still under development. Feedback and suggestions are very welcome and I encourage you to use the Issues list on Github to provide that feedback.

Feel free to fork this repo and to commit your additions. For a list of all contributors, please see the AUTHORS file.

Any questions, tips, or general discussion can be posted to our Google group: http://groups.google.com/group/gitflow-users

License terms

git-flow is published under the liberal terms of the BSD License, see the LICENSE file. Although the BSD License does not require you to share any modifications you make to the source code, you are very much encouraged and invited to contribute back your modifications to the community, preferably in a Github fork, of course.

Initialization

To initialize a new repo with the basic branch structure, use:

	git flow init

This will then interactively prompt you with some questions on which branches you would like to use as development and production branches, and how you would like your prefixes be named. You may simply press Return on any of those questions to accept the (sane) default suggestions.

Creating feature/release/hotfix/support branches

• To list/start/finish feature branches, use:

    git flow feature
    git flow feature start <name> [<base>]
    git flow feature finish <name>
  

  For feature branches, the <base> arg must be a commit on develop.

• To list/start/finish release branches, use:

    git flow release
    git flow release start <release> [<base>]
    git flow release finish <release>
  

  For release branches, the <base> arg must be a commit on develop.

• To list/start/finish hotfix branches, use:

    git flow hotfix
    git flow hotfix start <release> [<base>]
    git flow hotfix finish <release>
  

  For hotfix branches, the <base> arg must be a commit on master.

• To list/start support branches, use:

    git flow support
    git flow support start <release> <base>
  

  For support branches, the <base> arg must be a commit on master.