stigkj / gitflow

Git extensions to provide high-level repository operations for Vincent Driessen's branching model.

git-flow

A collection of Git extensions to provide high-level repository operations for Vincent Driessen's branching model.

Installing git-flow

The easiest way to install git-flow is using Rick Osborne's excellent git-flow installer, which can be run using the following command:

$ wget -q -O - http://github.com/nvie/gitflow/raw/develop/contrib/gitflow-installer.sh | sudo sh

If you prefer a manual installation, please use the following instructions. After downloading the sources from Github, also fetch the submodules:

$ git submodule init
$ git submodule update

Then, you can install git-flow, using:

$ sudo make install

By default, git-flow will be installed in /usr/local. To change the prefix where git-flow will be installed, simply specify it explicitly, using:

$ sudo make prefix=/opt/local install

Or simply point your PATH environment variable to your git-flow checkout directory.

Integration with your shell

For those who use the Bash shell, please check out the excellent work on the git-flow-completion project by bobthecow. It offers tab-completion for all git-flow subcommands and branch names.

If you are a zsh user with some plugin-writing experience, please help us develop a completion plugin for zsh, too. Please contact me on Github or Twitter to discuss details.

Please help out

This project is still under development. Feedback and suggestions are very welcome and I encourage you to use the Issues list on Github to provide that feedback.

Feel free to fork this repo and to commit your additions. For a list of all contributors, please see the AUTHORS file.

Any questions, tips, or general discussion can be posted to our Google group: http://groups.google.com/group/gitflow-users

License terms

git-flow is published under the liberal terms of the BSD License, see the LICENSE file. Although the BSD License does not require you to share any modifications you make to the source code, you are very much encouraged and invited to contribute back your modifications to the community, preferably in a Github fork, of course.

Typical usage:

Initialization

To initialize a new repo with the basic branch structure, use:

	git flow init

This will then interactively prompt you with some questions on which branches you would like to use as development and production branches, and how you would like your prefixes be named. You may simply press Return on any of those questions to accept the (sane) default suggestions.

Creating feature/release/hotfix/support branches

• To list/start/finish feature branches, use:

    git flow feature
    git flow feature start <name> [<base>]
    git flow feature finish <name>
  

  For feature branches, the <base> arg must be a commit on develop.

• To list/start/finish release branches, use:

    git flow release
    git flow release start <release> [<base>]
    git flow release finish <release>
  

  For release branches, the <base> arg must be a commit on develop.

• To list/start/finish hotfix branches, use:

    git flow hotfix
    git flow hotfix start <release> [<base>]
    git flow hotfix finish <release>
  

  For hotfix branches, the <base> arg must be a commit on master.

• To list/start support branches, use:

    git flow support
    git flow support start <release> <base>
  

  For support branches, the <base> arg must be a commit on master.