What are some examples of commonly used practices for naming git branches

Question

I ve been using a local git repository interacting with my group s CVS repository for several months  now   I ve made an almost neurotic number of branches  most of which have thankfully merged back into my trunk   But naming is starting to become an issue   If I have a task easily named with a simple label  but I accomplish it in three stages which each include their own branch and merge situation  then I can repeat the branch name each time  but that makes the history a little confusing   If I get more specific in the names  with a separate description for each stage  then the branch names start to get long and unwieldy   I did learn looking through old threads here that I could start naming branches with a   in the name  i e   topic task  or something like that   I may start doing that and seeing if it helps keep things better organized   What are some best practices for naming git branches   Edit  Nobody has actually suggested any naming conventions  I do delete branches when I m done with them   I just happen to have several around due to management constantly adjusting my priorities     As an example of why I might need more than one branch on a task  suppose I need to commit the first discrete milestone in the task to the group s CVS repository   At that point  due to my imperfect interaction with CVS  I would perform that commit and then kill that branch    I ve seen too much weirdness interacting with CVS if I try to continue to use the same branch at that point

User · Answer

My personal preference is to delete the branch name after I’m done with a topic branch.

Instead of trying to use the branch name to explain the meaning of the branch, I start the subject line of the commit message in the first commit on that branch with “Branch:” and include further explanations in the body of the message if the subject does not give me enough space.

The branch name in my use is purely a handle for referring to a topic branch while working on it. Once work on the topic branch has concluded, I get rid of the branch name, sometimes tagging the commit for later reference.

That makes the output of git branch more useful as well: it only lists long-lived branches and active topic branches, not all branches ever.

User · Answer

Why does it take three branches merges for every task  Can you explain more about that   If you use a bug tracking system you can use the bug number as part of the branch name  This will keep the branch names unique  and you can prefix them with a short and descriptive word or two to keep them human readable  like  ResizeWindow-43523   It also helps make things easier when you go to clean up branches  since you can look up the associated bug  This is how I usually name my branches   Since these branches are eventually getting merged back into master  you should be safe deleting them after you merge  Unless you re merging with --squash  the entire history of the branch will still exist should you ever need it

User · Answer

I ve mixed and matched from different schemes I ve seen and based on the tooling I m using  So my completed branch name would be      name feature issue-tracker-number short-description   which would translate to      mike blogs RSSI-12 logo-fix   The parts are separated by forward slashes because those get interpreted as folders in SourceTree for easy organization  We use Jira for our issue tracking so including the number makes it easier to look up in the system  Including that number also makes it searchable when trying to find that issue inside Github when trying to submit a pull request

User · Answer

I ve mixed and matched from different schemes I ve seen and based on the tooling I m using  So my completed branch name would be      name feature issue-tracker-number short-description   which would translate to      mike blogs RSSI-12 logo-fix   The parts are separated by forward slashes because those get interpreted as folders in SourceTree for easy organization  We use Jira for our issue tracking so including the number makes it easier to look up in the system  Including that number also makes it searchable when trying to find that issue inside Github when trying to submit a pull request

User · Answer

Why does it take three branches merges for every task  Can you explain more about that   If you use a bug tracking system you can use the bug number as part of the branch name  This will keep the branch names unique  and you can prefix them with a short and descriptive word or two to keep them human readable  like  ResizeWindow-43523   It also helps make things easier when you go to clean up branches  since you can look up the associated bug  This is how I usually name my branches   Since these branches are eventually getting merged back into master  you should be safe deleting them after you merge  Unless you re merging with --squash  the entire history of the branch will still exist should you ever need it

User · Answer

Here are some branch naming conventions that I use and the reasons for them  Branch naming conventions   Use grouping tokens  words  at the beginning of your branch names  Define and use short lead tokens to differentiate branches in a way that is meaningful to your workflow  Use slashes to separate parts of your branch names  Do not use bare numbers as leading parts  Avoid long descriptive names for long-lived branches    Group tokens  Use  grouping  tokens in front of your branch names    group1 foo group2 foo group1 bar group2 bar group3 bar group1 baz   The groups can be named whatever you like to match your workflow   I like to use short nouns for mine   Read on for more clarity   Short well-defined tokens  Choose short tokens so they do not add too much noise to every one of your branch names   I use these   wip       Works in progress  stuff I know won t be finished soon feat      Feature I m adding or expanding bug       Bug fix or experiment junk      Throwaway branch created to experiment   Each of these tokens can be used to tell you to which part of your workflow each branch belongs   It sounds like you have multiple branches for different cycles of a change  I do not know what your cycles are  but let s assume they are  new    testing  and  verified    You can name your branches with abbreviated versions of these tags  always spelled the same way  to both group them and to remind you which stage you re in   new frabnotz new foo new bar test foo test frabnotz ver foo   You can quickly tell which branches have reached each different stage  and you can group them together easily using Git s pattern matching options     git branch --list  test    test foo test frabnotz    git branch --list    foo  new foo test foo ver foo    gitk --branches    foo    Use slashes to separate parts  You may use most any delimiter you like in branch names  but I find slashes to be the most flexible  You might prefer to use dashes or dots   But slashes let you do some branch renaming when pushing or fetching to from a remote     git push origin  refs heads feature   refs heads phord feat      git push origin  refs heads bug   refs heads review bugfix      For me  slashes also work better for tab expansion  command completion  in my shell   The way I have it configured I can search for branches with different sub-parts by typing the first characters of the part and pressing the TAB key   Zsh then gives me a list of branches which match the part of the token I have typed   This works for preceding tokens as well as embedded ones     git checkout new lt TAB gt  Menu   new frabnotz   new foo   new bar     git checkout foo lt TAB gt  Menu   new foo   test foo   ver foo    Zshell is very configurable about command completion and I could also configure it to handle dashes  underscores or dots the same way  But I choose not to    It also lets you search for branches in many git commands  like this   git branch --list  feature    git log --graph --oneline --decorate --branches  feature     gitk --branches  feature       Caveat  As Slipp points out in the comments  slashes can cause problems   Because branches are implemented as paths  you cannot have a branch named  foo  and another branch named  foo bar    This can be confusing for new users   Do not use bare numbers  Do not use use bare numbers  or hex numbers  as part of your branch naming scheme  Inside tab-expansion of a reference name  git may decide that a number is part of a sha-1 instead of a branch name   For example  my issue tracker names bugs with decimal numbers   I name my related branches CRnnnnn rather than just nnnnn to avoid confusion       git checkout CR15032 lt TAB gt  Menu    fix CR15032    test CR15032   If I tried to expand just 15032  git would be unsure whether I wanted to search SHA-1 s or branch names  and my choices would be somewhat limited   Avoid long descriptive names  Long branch names can be very helpful when you are looking at a list of branches   But it can get in the way when looking at decorated one-line logs as the branch names can eat up most of the single line and abbreviate the visible part of the log   On the other hand long branch names can be more helpful in  merge commits  if you do not habitually rewrite them by hand   The default merge commit message is Merge branch  branch-name    You may find it more helpful to have merge messages show up as Merge branch  fix CR15032 crash-when-unformatted-disk-inserted  instead of just Merge branch  fix CR15032

User · Answer

Note  as illustrated in the commit e703d7 or commit b6c2a0d   March 2014   now part of Git 2 0  you will find another naming convention  that you can apply to branches        When you need to use space  use dash  is a strange way to say that you must not use a space    Because it is more common for the command line descriptions to use dashed-multi-words  you do not even want to use spaces in these places      A branch name cannot have space  see  Which characters are illegal within a branch name   and git check-ref-format man page    So for every branch name that would be represented by a multi-word expression  using a  -   dash  as a separator is a good idea

User · Answer

Why does it take three branches merges for every task  Can you explain more about that   If you use a bug tracking system you can use the bug number as part of the branch name  This will keep the branch names unique  and you can prefix them with a short and descriptive word or two to keep them human readable  like  ResizeWindow-43523   It also helps make things easier when you go to clean up branches  since you can look up the associated bug  This is how I usually name my branches   Since these branches are eventually getting merged back into master  you should be safe deleting them after you merge  Unless you re merging with --squash  the entire history of the branch will still exist should you ever need it

User · Answer

Why does it take three branches merges for every task  Can you explain more about that   If you use a bug tracking system you can use the bug number as part of the branch name  This will keep the branch names unique  and you can prefix them with a short and descriptive word or two to keep them human readable  like  ResizeWindow-43523   It also helps make things easier when you go to clean up branches  since you can look up the associated bug  This is how I usually name my branches   Since these branches are eventually getting merged back into master  you should be safe deleting them after you merge  Unless you re merging with --squash  the entire history of the branch will still exist should you ever need it

User · Answer

My personal preference is to delete the branch name after I’m done with a topic branch.

Instead of trying to use the branch name to explain the meaning of the branch, I start the subject line of the commit message in the first commit on that branch with “Branch:” and include further explanations in the body of the message if the subject does not give me enough space.

The branch name in my use is purely a handle for referring to a topic branch while working on it. Once work on the topic branch has concluded, I get rid of the branch name, sometimes tagging the commit for later reference.

That makes the output of git branch more useful as well: it only lists long-lived branches and active topic branches, not all branches ever.

User · Answer

Note  as illustrated in the commit e703d7 or commit b6c2a0d   March 2014   now part of Git 2 0  you will find another naming convention  that you can apply to branches        When you need to use space  use dash  is a strange way to say that you must not use a space    Because it is more common for the command line descriptions to use dashed-multi-words  you do not even want to use spaces in these places      A branch name cannot have space  see  Which characters are illegal within a branch name   and git check-ref-format man page    So for every branch name that would be represented by a multi-word expression  using a  -   dash  as a separator is a good idea

User · Answer

Following up on farktronix s suggestion  we have been using Jira ticket numbers for similar in mercurial  and I m planning to continue using them for git branches  But I think the ticket number itself is probably unique enough  While it might be helpful to have a descriptive word in the branch name as farktronix noted  if you are switching between branches often enough  you probably want less to type  Then if you need to know the branch name  look in Jira for the associated keywords in the ticket if you don t know it  In addition  you should include the ticket number in each comment   If your branch represents a version  it appears that the common convention is to use x x x  example   1 0 0   format for branch names and vx x x  example  v1 0 0   for tag names  to avoid conflict   See also  is-there-an-standard-naming-convention-for-git-tags

User · Answer

A successful Git branching model by Vincent Driessen has good suggestions  A picture is below  If this branching model appeals to you consider the flow extension to git  Others have commented about flow  Driessen s model includes   A master branch  used only for release  Typical name master  A  develop  branch off of that branch  That s the one used for most main-line work  Commonly named develop  Multiple feature branches off of the develop branch  Name based on the name of the feature  These will be merged back into develop  not into the master or release branches  Release branch to hold candidate releases  with only bug fixes and no new features  Typical name rc1 1    Hotfixes are short-lived branches for changes that come from master and will go into master without development branch being involved

User · Answer

My personal preference is to delete the branch name after I’m done with a topic branch.

Instead of trying to use the branch name to explain the meaning of the branch, I start the subject line of the commit message in the first commit on that branch with “Branch:” and include further explanations in the body of the message if the subject does not give me enough space.

The branch name in my use is purely a handle for referring to a topic branch while working on it. Once work on the topic branch has concluded, I get rid of the branch name, sometimes tagging the commit for later reference.

That makes the output of git branch more useful as well: it only lists long-lived branches and active topic branches, not all branches ever.

User · Answer

Following up on farktronix s suggestion  we have been using Jira ticket numbers for similar in mercurial  and I m planning to continue using them for git branches  But I think the ticket number itself is probably unique enough  While it might be helpful to have a descriptive word in the branch name as farktronix noted  if you are switching between branches often enough  you probably want less to type  Then if you need to know the branch name  look in Jira for the associated keywords in the ticket if you don t know it  In addition  you should include the ticket number in each comment   If your branch represents a version  it appears that the common convention is to use x x x  example   1 0 0   format for branch names and vx x x  example  v1 0 0   for tag names  to avoid conflict   See also  is-there-an-standard-naming-convention-for-git-tags

User · Answer

A successful Git branching model by Vincent Driessen has good suggestions  A picture is below  If this branching model appeals to you consider the flow extension to git  Others have commented about flow  Driessen s model includes   A master branch  used only for release  Typical name master  A  develop  branch off of that branch  That s the one used for most main-line work  Commonly named develop  Multiple feature branches off of the develop branch  Name based on the name of the feature  These will be merged back into develop  not into the master or release branches  Release branch to hold candidate releases  with only bug fixes and no new features  Typical name rc1 1    Hotfixes are short-lived branches for changes that come from master and will go into master without development branch being involved

User · Answer

My personal preference is to delete the branch name after I’m done with a topic branch.

Instead of trying to use the branch name to explain the meaning of the branch, I start the subject line of the commit message in the first commit on that branch with “Branch:” and include further explanations in the body of the message if the subject does not give me enough space.

The branch name in my use is purely a handle for referring to a topic branch while working on it. Once work on the topic branch has concluded, I get rid of the branch name, sometimes tagging the commit for later reference.

That makes the output of git branch more useful as well: it only lists long-lived branches and active topic branches, not all branches ever.

User · Answer

Here are some branch naming conventions that I use and the reasons for them  Branch naming conventions   Use grouping tokens  words  at the beginning of your branch names  Define and use short lead tokens to differentiate branches in a way that is meaningful to your workflow  Use slashes to separate parts of your branch names  Do not use bare numbers as leading parts  Avoid long descriptive names for long-lived branches    Group tokens  Use  grouping  tokens in front of your branch names    group1 foo group2 foo group1 bar group2 bar group3 bar group1 baz   The groups can be named whatever you like to match your workflow   I like to use short nouns for mine   Read on for more clarity   Short well-defined tokens  Choose short tokens so they do not add too much noise to every one of your branch names   I use these   wip       Works in progress  stuff I know won t be finished soon feat      Feature I m adding or expanding bug       Bug fix or experiment junk      Throwaway branch created to experiment   Each of these tokens can be used to tell you to which part of your workflow each branch belongs   It sounds like you have multiple branches for different cycles of a change  I do not know what your cycles are  but let s assume they are  new    testing  and  verified    You can name your branches with abbreviated versions of these tags  always spelled the same way  to both group them and to remind you which stage you re in   new frabnotz new foo new bar test foo test frabnotz ver foo   You can quickly tell which branches have reached each different stage  and you can group them together easily using Git s pattern matching options     git branch --list  test    test foo test frabnotz    git branch --list    foo  new foo test foo ver foo    gitk --branches    foo    Use slashes to separate parts  You may use most any delimiter you like in branch names  but I find slashes to be the most flexible  You might prefer to use dashes or dots   But slashes let you do some branch renaming when pushing or fetching to from a remote     git push origin  refs heads feature   refs heads phord feat      git push origin  refs heads bug   refs heads review bugfix      For me  slashes also work better for tab expansion  command completion  in my shell   The way I have it configured I can search for branches with different sub-parts by typing the first characters of the part and pressing the TAB key   Zsh then gives me a list of branches which match the part of the token I have typed   This works for preceding tokens as well as embedded ones     git checkout new lt TAB gt  Menu   new frabnotz   new foo   new bar     git checkout foo lt TAB gt  Menu   new foo   test foo   ver foo    Zshell is very configurable about command completion and I could also configure it to handle dashes  underscores or dots the same way  But I choose not to    It also lets you search for branches in many git commands  like this   git branch --list  feature    git log --graph --oneline --decorate --branches  feature     gitk --branches  feature       Caveat  As Slipp points out in the comments  slashes can cause problems   Because branches are implemented as paths  you cannot have a branch named  foo  and another branch named  foo bar    This can be confusing for new users   Do not use bare numbers  Do not use use bare numbers  or hex numbers  as part of your branch naming scheme  Inside tab-expansion of a reference name  git may decide that a number is part of a sha-1 instead of a branch name   For example  my issue tracker names bugs with decimal numbers   I name my related branches CRnnnnn rather than just nnnnn to avoid confusion       git checkout CR15032 lt TAB gt  Menu    fix CR15032    test CR15032   If I tried to expand just 15032  git would be unsure whether I wanted to search SHA-1 s or branch names  and my choices would be somewhat limited   Avoid long descriptive names  Long branch names can be very helpful when you are looking at a list of branches   But it can get in the way when looking at decorated one-line logs as the branch names can eat up most of the single line and abbreviate the visible part of the log   On the other hand long branch names can be more helpful in  merge commits  if you do not habitually rewrite them by hand   The default merge commit message is Merge branch  branch-name    You may find it more helpful to have merge messages show up as Merge branch  fix CR15032 crash-when-unformatted-disk-inserted  instead of just Merge branch  fix CR15032

[git] What are some examples of commonly used practices for naming git branches?

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