Branches

At a high level, Git Town distinguishes long-lived from short-lived Git branches.

Long-lived branches

Branches that live forever are called perennial branches. Typical names for perennial branches are main, master, development, production, or staging. Amongst these, the main branch holds a special role: it is the the default base from which short-lived branches are cut, and into which short-lived branches are merged.

Short-lived branches

Short-lived branches typically used for active development. They are typically created from a perennial branch and merged back into the same perennial branch. They can also form a hierarchy of branches called a stack. Git Town distinguishes short-lived branches that you own vs those that you don’t own.

Short-lived branches owned by you

• feature branch: a branch that you do work on, Git Town keeps it up to date for you
• prototype branch: an early-stage feature branch, not ready to be pushed to a shared remote
• parked branch: a feature branch you own but aren’t actively working on, Git Town doesn’t sync it to reduce noise

Short-lived branches owned by others

• contribution branches: somebody else’s feature branch that you are contributing code to, but no lifecycle events like sync, ship, or delete
• observed branches: somebody else’s feature branch that you review but aren’t contributing code to

Configuring branch types

Git Town offers powerful configuration settings to automatically classify local branches:

• branches.main: automatically treated as perennial
• branches.perennials explicit list of perennial branches
• branches.perennial-regex all branches matching this regular expression are considered perennial
• branches.contribution-regex: all branches matching this regular expression are considered contribution branches
• branches.observed-regex: all branches matching this regular expression are considered observed branches
• create.new-branch-type defines the type that branches you create via commands like git town hack, append, or prepend

Manually setting branch types

You can override the branch type for each branch using one of these commands:

• git town contribute: mark a branch as a contribution branch
• git town observe: mark a branch as observed
• git town park: mark a branch as parked
• git town prototype: create or convert a branch to a prototype branch
• git town hack: create or convert a branch to a feature branch