Git Workflow advice

Question

First of all I'm not very experienced with Git and I am looking for some advices because I am facing the following issue: my department is having the following branches and using the continuous delivery pipelines in Git:

1. DEV which has a corresponding branch (called master) in Git
2. PROD with production branch in Git so when we merge master in the Prod branch all our developments goes to Prod environment.

How we proceed: for every new feature we create a new feature branch on master and we commit the changes on master in order to have them on the Test environment and check if they work. So on master there are different commits for features that may be ready to go in Prod and other features that are still in development/test phase. It's even getting more complex if more people works on same things, changing same files for example.

So we only have DEV and PROD and it's not possible to have another extra environment.

And because of that we face some issues when is time to promote those changes to PROD like not promoting all changes or promoting changes that are not yet ready for PROD.

So my question is what will be in your opinion the best practice scenario for this specific situation? So if you have some experience any help is very much appreciated.

Thanks a lot for taking your time to read my question!

Answer 1

A common approach is to develop features on separate branches, brached of from you development branch (in your case master), and only to merge them back when they are finished. The last part is important here: if changes are not ready to be promoted to production, do not yet merge them to develop, but first bring them to a state where they don't break stuff.

See here for a detailed description of this model.

Your problem here is that you have to merge back to develop to be able to test. This does not seem to be practicable. You could add another layer, like a testing branch where you merge to test your changes, and only merge them to master if they work properly. But, as I said, a better approach would be to test on your feature branches and not merge breaking stuff to develop in the first place.