Development Process

Developing and Deploying with Branches

We adopted git-flow and its use of environment branches. This means that for each environment (staging and production) we have a branch for it. Whenever someone wants to deploy to staging, they will need to update the staging branch. For production, master. We use a staging environment where our team or clients can review changes together. Having automated deployment from a staging branch helps in keeping the environment as close as possible to production. The idea of this flow was introduced by beanstalkapp.

Branching model

Branching model is like this: develop - destination branch for our Github PRs

staging - automatically deploys to the staging environment

master - automatically deploys to the production environment

Best Practises

• Only merge to develop if your changes can be immediately deployed. Consider using feature switches.

• Never commit to staging or master branches. Use fast-forward merge from staging.

• If develop becomes unstable and cannot be deployed, announce it in the slack channel #tech-infrastructure so that nobody would deploy your changes to production. If a quick fix is not available, proceed to revert your changes as soon as possible.

Merges should only flow in one direction

Example how to make your commits go to production

1) Create a branch

You usually get branch name from clubhouse with git helpers

git checkout -b see-clubhouse/chl33t/title-of-story

This should be done from develop.

2) Pull request

After making the change, create a PR in Github. After the reviewers are done and all conversations are resolved, use the merge button. This will create merge commit that can be used for Release Notes.

3) Merges and deployment

Once the changes are in develop, feel free to deploy to staging by git command git merge origin/develop from staging branch as base branch. Be careful not to create a merge commit, only fast-forward at this point. So full commands would be

• git checkout staging

• git merge origin/develop

After checking staging env and you have checked your changes, you can merge and deploy to master

• git checkout master

• git merge origin/staging