Lets see the usages of Git Branching with real-world examples including how to create a branch, update it, delete it, switch to another branch, and merge them locally and remotely.

Most of the software projects have two mainstream branches as master and dev.

The master branch is used for ready for production changes and the dev branch is used for testing purposes.

When new changes are tested on the dev branch, eventually it will be merged into the master branch and finally, we will take a deployment on the master branch.

we should work neither on the master branch nor on the dev branch directly. For every tiny or massive change in a software project, we should first create a new branch from the dev branch by naming the new branch related to our new change.

Let me assume that we already have a GitHub repository.

And you can see we have only the “master” branch which is created by default.

Setting Remote and Local Branches

Branch on Remote

But as most software projects have common branches as master and dev. Click on branch section and By typing “dev” and clicking the appeared “Create branch: dev” section, we can create the dev branch on the remote repository.

Create a Branch on Local Repository

git pull origin dev

git branch ==> master and dev branch will be there in local repo

Switching branches

Now we are ready for development and just before starting, we need to change our current branch from master to dev by using git command on our local repository.

git checkout dev

The dev branch which will be our main development branch. All development operations will be originated from that branch.

Now Let us create a new branch from the dev branch

git branch my-bugfix

Now make changes to your branch and commit the changes

push the branch to github

git push origin my-bugfix

After pushing our commit with our new branch, we can check the remote repository from the branches section. You could see the new branch

Once you work on branch is complete, you can delete it

git branch -D my-new-branch

Delete a branch on Remote repo

git push origin --delete my-bugfix