Understand Branches

What is a Branch?

A Git branch is a movable reference to a line of development. More precisely, a branch points to a commit in the repository history. When new commits are made on that branch, the branch reference moves forward to the newest commit.

Branches allow you to work on changes without immediately changing another branch. This makes it possible to keep production code separate from work that is still being developed and tested.

Think of a branch as an independent working line within the same repository. The files in your working directory change according to the branch you have currently checked out.

For example, if main contains the current production version, you can create a feature branch from it and make several commits there. Those commits belong to the feature branch until the work is eventually merged into another branch.

main Branch

In this guide, main represents the production branch. It is the branch that contains the version of the project intended to be deployed to the production website.

Git does not require main to be the production branch. This is a workflow convention used by this guide. Teams can choose different branch strategies, but using main as the production branch keeps the workflow simple for this project.

Feature Branches

A feature branch is created from main for a specific piece of development work.

Once the feature branch is created, new commits can be made there without changing the commits on main. This gives you a separate place to develop and test the change.

main
│
└── feature/homepage

Examples of feature branches include:

The feature/ prefix is a naming convention used in this guide. Git does not require this format. The important part is that the name clearly communicates the purpose of the branch.

Creating a Branch

Start from the branch you want to use as the foundation for your new work. In this guide, that branch is usually main.

Before creating the feature branch, update your local main so that the new work starts from the latest version available on GitHub.

git switch main
git pull
git switch -c feature/homepage

The first command switches to main. The git pull command retrieves and integrates the latest changes from the configured remote branch. The final command creates a new branch named feature/homepage and switches to it immediately.

After the final command, your working directory is on the new feature branch. Any commits you make for the homepage work will belong to that branch rather than directly to main.

Starting from an up-to-date base branch reduces the chance that you begin new work from an outdated version of the project.

Switching Branches

Use git switch to move between existing branches.

git switch main

git switch feature/homepage

When you switch branches, Git updates the files in your working directory to match the commit at the tip of the branch you switched to.

Branch Naming

Clear branch names make it easier to understand what a branch is intended to contain.

This guide uses a simple feature/ prefix for branches that contain new development work. The naming convention is a team choice; Git itself does not require a particular naming format.

A good branch name should be short enough to read easily and specific enough to explain the work it represents.

Branch Workflow

The branch model used throughout this guide can be summarized as:

main
│
├── feature/homepage
│
├── feature/navigation
│
└── feature/contact-page

A feature branch is developed and tested independently. The changes can be committed to that branch without changing main.

Once the work is ready, the feature branch can be pushed to GitHub and reviewed through a pull request before being merged into main.

After the merge, main contains the completed change and can continue through the production deployment workflow described later in this guide.