Professional Git Workflow
📌 Covered in this chapter:
GitHub Flow · Git Flow · Trunk-Based Development · Feature Flags
Compare real-world team workflows — GitHub Flow, Git Flow, and trunk-based development — and pick the right one for your team.
1Professional Git Workflow — What You'll Learn
Compare real-world team workflows — GitHub Flow, Git Flow, and trunk-based development — and pick the right one for your team.
Here's everything this chapter covers, in the order you'll learn it:
- Trunk-based development (small, frequent merges to main)
- GitHub Flow (simple: branch, PR, merge, deploy)
- Git Flow (structured: develop, release, hotfix branches)
- Using release branches
- Using hotfix branches for urgent fixes
- Feature flags as an alternative to long-lived branches
- Keeping pull requests small
- Squash merge vs regular merge vs rebase and merge
- Tagging releases consistently
- Maintaining a changelog over time
- Having a clear rollback strategy
2Best Practices & Common Pitfalls
💡 Key things to remember:
- There's no single 'correct' workflow — small, fast-moving teams often thrive with simple GitHub Flow and trunk-based development, while teams shipping versioned software with scheduled releases often prefer Git Flow's structure.
❓ Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Q What's the most important thing to understand about professional git workflow?
Focus on: GitHub Flow · Git Flow · Trunk-Based Development · Feature Flags. These are the core building blocks this chapter's examples are built around, and they show up repeatedly in later chapters of this course.
Q Is professional git workflow something I'll use often in real projects?
Yes — every concept in this chapter reflects a real, everyday part of professional Git and GitHub workflows, not just a theoretical exercise.