Main > Technical Guidelines and Style > Git

Branches

• Never delete a remote branch with unmerged commits without asking the author first.
• Never merge a pull request when the branch being merged to is red on CircleCI UNLESS the purpose of the pull request is to fix the test.
• Don’t force push to a shared branch without approval from all involved.
• Prefix all your branch names with your initials or username. This helps prevent name collisions.
• Avoid using slashes (/) in branch names. Git handles these in a weird way and it can cause unexpected name collisions.
• Remove branches that have been merged or not necessary for reference from GitHub.
• If your branch has a merge conflict with master, prefer rebasing on master to merging, with the following caveats (in either case see Merging):
  • You must merge if the branch is a shared feature branch.
  • If there are complex conflicts to be resolved, merging may make it clearer to resolve these.
• When a team is using a feature branch to collaborate on larger pieces of work, the feature branch must be protected.
  • Branch protection settings are addressed in the wiki.