Engineering Blog

It’s Tuesday morning and a bug has just been found in production. We were about to start working on a user story, but we need to switch gears and fix this bug.

Our repository currently looks like the following.

      BRANCH
        |
(A) -- (C)

(B) -- (D)
        |
     *master*

We need a topic branch based on BRANCH so that we can fix this bug.

git checkout -b DE1234 BRANCH

     *DE1234*
        |
      BRANCH
        |
(A) -- (C)

(B) -- (D)
        |
      master

We find and fix the defect. After committing the fix, our repository is in the following state.

      BRANCH  *DE1234*
        |        |
(A) -- (C) ---- (E)

(B) -- (D)
        |
      master

We need to integrate our fix with origin/BRANCH. The workflow for this integration is very similar to the user story workflow.

If you want to read a full explanation, read the first article in this series.

git fetch
git rebase origin/BRANCH

      BRANCH  origin/BRANCH   *DE1234*
        |           |             |
(A) -- (C) ------- (F) --------- (E')

(B) -- (D)
        |
      master

git push origin HEAD:BRANCH

                origin/BRANCH
                      |
      BRANCH       *DE1234*
        |             |
(A) -- (C) -- (F) -- (E')

(B) -- (D)
        |
      master

After the above series of commands, we have integrated and pushed our changes to the origin BRANCH. We now need to merge our changes to the master branch.

We need to ensure that our local BRANCH has all of our changes.

git checkout BRANCH
git pull

                origin/BRANCH
                      |
                   *BRANCH*
                      |
(A) -- (C) -- (F) -- (E')

(B) -- (D)
        |
      master

We now need to pull changes for master.

git checkout master
git pull

                origin/BRANCH
                      |
                    BRANCH
                      |
(A) -- (C) -- (F) -- (E')

(B) -- (D)
        |
     *master*
        |
  origin/master

We are ready to merge.

git merge BRANCH

                origin/BRANCH
                      |
                    BRANCH
                      |
(A) -- (C) -- (F) -- (E') --+
                             \
(B) -- (D) ----------------- (G)
        |                     |
  origin/master            *master*

Our changes have now been merged into the master. We still need to push our merge to origin’s master.

git push origin master

                origin/BRANCH
                      |
                    BRANCH
                      |
(A) -- (C) -- (F) -- (E') --+
                             \
(B) -- (D) ----------------- (G)
                              |
                           *master*
                              |
                        origin/master

We have successfully merged our changes from the branch and pushed them to the origin. We are now ready to start on our user story.