Gitflow is a legacy Git workflow that was originally a disruptive and novel strategy for managing Git branches. Gitflow has fallen in popularity in favor of trunk-based workflows, which are now considered best practices for modern continuous software development. However, we think it's good to know how it works because it's likely to join a team that still uses.
master & develop branches
In Gitflow we use develop as the development branch, meaning we will include our new features here. Once a new version is ready for the App Store, we will merge develop into master (via a release branch, as we will see in this article) and create a tag with the version on the latter.
Therefore, develop will record all development activity, while master will only record releases to the App Store. In other words, it will maintain the production version of the code (App Store).
Feature branches
When creating a new feature, such as a new part of our app (like a screen, for example), we will create a branch from the most recent commit on develop. We'll make all the commits for that feature there until it’s ready, and then merge the feature branch into develop.
Release branches
When making a release, we will create a branch from develop to test this version without the code changing, since the rest of the team will continue adding new features to develop.
The only changes we can make on this branch are "bug fixes," documentation, or anything related to the release. In other words, changes that don't impact the functionality of the app, as that could introduce new bugs.
Once our release branch is ready, we will merge it into master, add a tag to it, and if there were any changes made directly to this branch that are not present in develop, we will merge those into develop as well.
Hotfix branches
If a bug is found in production that needs to be fixed immediately without waiting for the next release, we can create a hotfix branch from master. Once we include the fix in this branch, we will merge it into both master and develop.
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