Branching Models

Below are some popular git branching development models and how to configure them with git-mkver:

• main (aka trunk) based development
• Git flow
• GitHub flow

Controlling the next version number

Regardless of the branching strategy, git-mkver uses the commit messages to determine the next version number.

See Usage for more details.

main (aka trunk) based development

This mode of operation works out of the box with the default configuration.

Overview:

• Developers commit to main or work on feature branches
• All releases are done from the main branch
• Only the main branch is tagged
• Release Candidates are not used
• Any version number not from main includes build metadata to indicate it is not an official release

Build Server Setup

The build script run by the build server would look something like:

nextVer=$(git mkver next)
# patch the version number into files as needed
git mkver patch
# build software ...
# If successful:
git mkver tag
# Publish artifacts and push tag

To control the frequency of releases, include these steps only on manually triggered builds.

Git flow

Git Flow is a long standing and popular branching model.

GitHub flow

GitHub Flow is a newer, simplified versioning model developed by GitHub.