Git skills
Git without a master branch
Some organizations disallow pushing to the origin/master branch in Git. In such cases getting rid of the local master branch can help us save time. It takes time maintaining the local master, or fetching and merging master into our feature branch.
We have no reason for maintaining master if we cannot push to origin/master, but we often feel like we should anyway. This involves checking out the workspace master is pointing to, and merging forward (usually by pulling) to origin/master. Both of which can be slow operations in large repositories.
Commonly when we start working on a new feature we create a new branch for it. Experienced Git users may do so with a command like:
git checkout -b feature/next-feature masterThis saves us from first having to check out master, and then create a branch. However, if we stop maintaining master this can lead to our branch being several commits out of sync with origin, resulting in a doom-merge.
My preferred solution is to simply delete the local master. Then I cannot accidentally refer to it, or check it out. Git allows this no questions asked by the way.
git branch -d masterThe command above still works if we add origin/:
git checkout -b feature/next-feature origin/masterThis has the added benefit, that origin/master becomes the tracked branch, and since it is a remote branch it is read-only. In practice, this means that when we can do git pull on our branch git automatically merges in any changes to origin/master.
This makes us merge more often, which helps us avoid doom-merges. If we set up pull to use rebase by default we even avoid all the merge commits.
git config --global pull.rebase trueThe only caveat is that we have to type out git push origin HEAD when we want to push. If we set the upstream we lose our connection to origin/master. However, we can easily remedy this by simply creating an alias for it:
git config --global alias.pu "git push origin HEAD"If you liked this post you should definitely check out my book as well:
