Branches
Overview
Teaching: 20 min
Exercises: 0 minQuestions
What are branches?
How can I work in parallel using branches?
Objectives
Understand why branches are useful for:
working on separate tasks in the same repository concurrently
trying multiple solutions to a problem
check-pointing versions of code
Merge branches back into the main branch
So far we’ve always been working in a straight timeline.
However, there are times when we might want to keep
our main work safe from experimental changes we are working on.
To do this we can use branches to work on separate tasks in parallel
without changing our current branch, main
.
We didn’t see it before but the first branch made is called main
.
This is the default branch created when initializing a repository and
is often considered to be the “clean” or “working” version of a
repository’s code.
We can see what branches exist in a repository by typing
$ git branch
* main
The ‘*’ indicates which branch we are currently on.
In this lesson, Dracula is trying to run an analysis and doesn’t know if it will be faster in bash or python. To keep his main branch safe he will use separate branches for both bash and python analysis. Then he will merge the branch with the faster script into his main branch.
First let’s make the python branch.
We use the same git branch
command but now add the
name we want to give our new branch
$ git branch pythondev
We can now check our work with the git branch
command.
$ git branch
* main
pythondev
We can see that we created the pythondev
branch but we
are still in the main branch.
We can also see this in the output of the git status
command.
$ git status
On branch main
nothing to commit, working directory clean
To switch to our new branch we can use the checkout
command
we learned earlier and check our work with git branch
.
$ git checkout pythondev
$ git branch
main
* pythondev
Before we used the checkout
command to checkout a file from a specific commit
using commit hashes or HEAD
and the filename (git checkout HEAD <file>
). The
checkout
command can also be used to checkout an entire previous version of the
repository, updating all files in the repository to match the state of a desired commit.
Branches allow us to do this using a human-readable name rather than memorizing
a commit hash. This name also typically gives purpose to the set of changes in
that branch. When we use the command git checkout <branch_name>
, we are using
a nickname to checkout a version of the repository that matches the most recent
commit in that branch (a.k.a. the HEAD of that branch).
Here you can use git log
and ls
to see that the history and
files are the same as our main
branch. This will be true until
some changes are committed to our new branch.
Now lets make our python script.
For simplicity sake, we will touch
the script making an empty file
but imagine we spent hours working on this python script for our analysis.
$ touch analysis.py
Now we can add and commit the script to our branch.
$ git add analysis.py
$ git commit -m "Wrote and tested python analysis script"
[pythondev x792csa1] Wrote and tested python analysis script
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
create mode 100644 analysis.py
Lets check our work!
$ ls
$ git log --oneline
As expected, we see our commit in the log.
Now let’s switch back to the main
branch.
$ git checkout main
$ git branch
* main
pythondev
Let’s explore the repository a bit.
Now that we’ve confirmed we are on the main
branch again.
Let’s confirm that analysis.py
and our last commit aren’t in main
.
$ ls
$ git log --oneline
We no longer see the file analysis.py
and our latest commit doesn’t
appear in this branch’s history. But do not fear! All of our hard work
remains in the pythondev
branch. We can confirm this by moving back
to that branch.
$ git checkout pythondev
$ git branch
main
* pythondev
$ ls
$ git log --oneline
And we see that our analysis.py
file and respective commit have been
preserved in the pythondev
branch.
Now we can repeat the process for our bash script in a branch called
bashdev
.
First we must checkout the main
branch again. New branches will
include the entire history up to the current commit, and we’d like
to keep these two tasks separate.
$ git checkout main
$ git branch
* main
pythondev
This time let’s create and switch two the bashdev
branch
in one command.
We can do so by adding the -b
flag to checkout.
$ git checkout -b bashdev
$ git branch
* bashdev
main
pythonndev
We can use ls
and git log
to see that this branch is
the same as our current main
branch.
Now we can make analysis.sh
and add and commit it.
Again imagine instead of touch
ing the file we worked
on it for many hours.
$ touch analysis.sh
$ git add analysis.sh
$ git commit –m “Wrote and tested bash analysis script”
[bashdev 2n779ds] Wrote and tested bash analysis script
1 file changed, 1 insertion(+)
create mode 100644 analysis.sh
Lets check our work again before we switch back to the main branch.
$ ls
$ git log --oneline
So it turns out the python analysis.py
is much faster than analysis.sh
.
Let’s merge this version into our main
branch so we can use it for
our work going forward.
Merging brings the changes from a different branch into the current branch.
First we must switch to the branch we’re merging changes into, main
.
$ git checkout main
$ git branch
bashdev
* main
pythonndev
Now we can merge
the pythondev
branch into our current branch
(main
). In english, this command could be stated as “git
, please
merge
the changes in the pythondev
branch into the current branch
I’m in”.
$ git merge pythondev
Updating 12687f6..x792csa1
Fast-forward
analysis.py | 0
1 file changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
create mode 100644 analysis.py
Now that we’ve merged the pythondev
into main
, these changes
exist in both branches. This could be confusing in the future if we
stumble upon the pythondev
branch again.
We can delete our old branches so as to avoid this confusion later.
We can do so by adding the -d
flag to the git branch
command.
git branch -d pythondev
Deleted branch pythondev (was x792csa1).
And because we don’t want to keep the changes in the bashdev
branch,
we can delete the bashdev
branch as well
$ git branch -d bashdev
error: The branch 'bashdev' is not fully merged.
If you are sure you want to delete it, run 'git branch -D bashdev'.
Since we’ve never merged the changes from the bashdev
branch,
git warns us about deleting them and tells us to use the -D
flag instead.
Since we really want to delete this branch we will go ahead and do so.
git branch -D bashdev
Deleted branch bashdev (was 2n779ds).
Key Points
Branches can be useful for developing while keeping the main line static.