Feature branch workflow¶

The feature branch workflow is a development style that is well-suited for small teams, which encourages having all feature development work take place on a dedicated branch of your Git repository, instead of committing locally to the standard master branch. A sample workflow is as follows:

1. A developer creates a new branch (based on the master branch) to start work on a new feature.

2. When the work is completed, the feature branch is pushed back to the origin, which is the remote of the developer’s forked repository.

3. The developer opens a pull request against master, giving other team members the chance to review the developer’s work.

4. After the developer’s work is accepted, it is merged into the master branch.

Larger teams should instead consider the Gitflow workflow as it provides better release management than the simpler feature branch workflow.

Gitflow workflow¶

The Gitflow workflow extends the feature branch workflow by requiring developers to submit pull requests against a develop branch which serves as an integration branch for new feature, while maintaining a stable master branch that remains in a good state.

Here is a description of a sample workflow based on Gitflow:

1. A developer creates a new branch (based on an up-to-date develop branch) to start work on a new feature.

2. When the developer completes work, the feature branch is pushed back to the origin, which is the remote of the developer’s forked repository.

3. The developer opens a pull request against the develop branch, giving other team members the chance to review the developer’s work prior to merging into the develop branch.

4. After the pull request is approved and the features merged into the develop branch, a new release branch is created off of the develop branch.

5. The development team continues to create feature branches off of the develop branch, while the release team prepares the release branch to add only what is necessary for the release.

6. As part of releasing the code, the release branch is merged back into master.

7. The develop branch is rebased onto master to incorporate the changes made in the latest release.

In this development strategy, any needed hotfixes are merged directly into a hotfix branch, which can then be merged with master.

Production is an artifact of development¶

The underlying principle: production is an artifact of development. Put differently, the things that you need to run your Drupal site in a production capacity are not the same things that you need to develop your Drupal site locally.

For instance, you can use a suite of tools like Lando, Documentation, CHANGELOGs, Unoptimized Images, PHP CodeSniffer, and SASS to develop your Drupal application. These are tools used to produce your site, but not your site. Therefore, these tools do not belong on your production server.

The build process is intended to take your development “source” code and produce an artifact that is production ready. Often, this means removing development-only packages, sanitizing your codebase, and optimizing your application for performance.