Team safe way to deploy a branch to production
1. Fetch all branches and sync the main
git fetch --all
git checkout main
git pull origin main
2. Sync dev and resolve any conflicts
git checkout dev
git pull origin dev
git merge main
3. Merge to Production
git checkout main
git merge dev
4. Tag Version and Push to Remote
git tag -a v0.0.0 -m "some fixes"
git push origin main --tags
Mistake: Branched dev and developed a new feature over it
Last week, I wanted to redesign the landing page for Pitch Like This. Made a mistake of branching the dev branch instead of main. Dev branch already had an entire epic - think database migration, API integrations, UI changes and what not.
Thankfully when it came to merging, I created the PR and went through the list of commits and that’s when my mistake occurred to me.
Next, without knowing I could cherry pick commits using git (thankfully I atleast committed diligently) - I developed a feature flag that would hide the UI elements and API triggers based on an environment variable value.
After wasting the AI credits into the feature flag - I got to know that I could simply cherry pick the landing page commits into a new main branch.
git checkout main
git checkout -b feat/landing-page-redesign-cherrypick
git cherry-pick abc123^.. xyz890
Cleaning up branches in local
I have been doing “squash and merge” for PRs on my remote repository. This means a completely new commit is generated with all combined commits from my branch.
This means that henceforth on production - I could only revert the whole branch merge and not individual commits if any failures occur. And if the feature branch is well unit tested and UAT is completed - this should not be an issue.
However this paragraph is about how to clean up the local post merging the main.
So when I squash and merge and then git fetch my main - my local git does not understand that the merge has been successful (because of how squashing works) - hence the safest way of deleting local branches is as follows:
[delete merged branches from the PR timeline on your Remote]
git fetch --prune (delinks the local branches if no more remote found)
git branch -vv | grep ': gone]' (lists all the branches that have been pruned from remote)
git branch -D branch-name (force deletes each branch locally)