Workflow

Protected branches: develop and master

The main idea is to keep the master branch clean and functional, even if not completely up to date. No commits are made to master and pull requests should only be made from the develop branch. This branch is protected and needs 2 reviewers before a merge can be made.

In this project, the develop branch is set as the default branch, so any pull requests default to develop. This branch is intended to be more up to date, even if any merge should be made through a pull request, reviews are only suggested and not mandatory.

Feature branches

Feature branches should be made from and up to date develop, and when the feature is ready a pull request to develop can be made.

hotfix and release branches

When a bug reached master it is necessary to create a new branch from master, fix the bug, and merge this hotfix branch directly to master and develop.

It is also possible to define release branches, between develop and master. The idea is to freeze new functionalities from a current develop and include only bug fixes (no new features).

OK... What do I type? Where do I click?

develop and master branches

master and develop branches should be automatically synchronized with heroku.

To create the develop branch from master (-b for new branch, origin is the default name of a remote):

git checkout -b develop
git push -u origin develop

Using a feature branch

First step is always to make sure our local develop branch is up to date:

git checkout develop
git pull

Then a feature branch can be created:

git checkout -b devise-for-owners

Work can be done in this feature branch with regular commits and pushes:

git push -u devise-for-owners
[work]
git add . && git commit -m "Owner model with devise" && git push
[work]
git add . && git commit -m "Navbar links updated" && git push
...

From times to times, and especially before creating a pull request, it is necessary to keep track of any upstream changes in develop:

git checkout develop
git pull                # There should be no conflicts
git checkout add-devise
git merge develop       # Conflicts can happen here and should be fixed

Testing in prod

Each contributor should deploy its own heroku app

heroku create my-own-happy-minute

And set all config variables (ENV) with:

heroku config set ENV_VAR="value"

And push the feature branch to heroku to test before PR (the easiest way is to go to the Deploy tab on your heroku dashboard and select the specific branch you are working on). Because git push heroku branch will only trigger build on branch master or main.