Upgrade Your Drupal Skills

We trained 1,000+ Drupal Developers over the last decade.

See Advanced Courses NAH, I know Enough

Drupal Development Workflow with Git

Parent Feed: 

At the 2012 Bay Area Drupal Camp, I presented a session laying out a possible dev-test-live development workflow branching model using Git. This continues on from the session I presented last year, Beginning Git.

This presentation borrowed heavily from two sources: First, an article on a successful Git branching model that describes, among other things, the process for maintaining a useful dev branch, and allowing feature and bug fix branches to always branch off of that one. The second source is a class I helped develop for Chapter Three called Drupal Development Best Practices. Much of this session is covered in that class. Conveniently enough, Chapter Three is offering the class next month.

It's important to note that this is by no means the Only Way to do this. In fact, shortly following my presentation at BADCamp, I had several great discussions from other people who use other strategies. It was so neat to hear what people are doing with their own workflow. One person said that they prefer using tags for the Test and Live code pushes instead of separate branches. That's not a bad idea.

Git is so flexible that you can really make it work for you however you can work best. The most important thing, though, is to spend some time to develop (and document) a standard workflow that your whole team can follow. And then stick with it. SVN was easy: just use Trunk. Git is so exceedingly powerful that it can be ridiculously confusing if you are jumping into a team and don't know the workflow. It's too easy to screw it all up for everybody.

I made a screencast of the presentation, but I'm having trouble embedding it, so you'll have to settle for link to Vimeo for now.

Author: 
Original Post: 

About Drupal Sun

Drupal Sun is an Evolving Web project. It allows you to:

  • Do full-text search on all the articles in Drupal Planet (thanks to Apache Solr)
  • Facet based on tags, author, or feed
  • Flip through articles quickly (with j/k or arrow keys) to find what you're interested in
  • View the entire article text inline, or in the context of the site where it was created

See the blog post at Evolving Web

Evolving Web