CODEWITHSUNDEEP
androidgitgithub
An SO User
An SO User

Reputation: 24998

Creating a branch in Git to add new feature to Android app

I am learning how to use Git for version control. One of the uses of creating branches is to add new features while master branch contains the stable code. I am using Git Bash for Windows in conjunction with Eclipse for editing the code.

So, assuming that I want to create a new feature called social-share and a branch named the same, how would I go about doing that?

Wont I first have to create a branch, commit the entire master branch to it and then add new feature code?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 279

Answers (1)

MrEngineer13
MrEngineer13

Reputation: 38856

So I'm assuming that you already have a branch called develop where your development occurs. The first thing to do is create the feature branch based on the current branch and switch to the created branch

$ git checkout -b social-share

Optionally if you want to push that branch to a remote Git repo to track it there:

$ git push -u origin social-share

Pushing the branch to the remote repo is dependent on your environment and whether or not you want others to work on this branch.

Once you've finished your changes to the social-share branch you'll want to merge those back into your develop branch.

  1. First switch to develop branch

    $ git checkout develop

  2. Merge social-share into devleop*

    $ git merge --no-ff social-share

  3. Delete social-share branch

    $ git branch -d social-share

  4. Push changes to origin

    $ git push origin develop

* The reason you use the --no-ff flag is so the merge uses a new commit object and to avoid just fast-forwarding the develop branch which preserves the fact that the social-share branch existed at one point.

If you want to read more about this branching model then checkout the post it was based on. Also, if you would like to learn more about git branching by actually doing it there's a great tutorial series/sandbox that you should checkout (git it?).

Upvotes: 1

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