What and Why
Git gives you branching — but it doesn't tell you how to use it. A Git workflow is the shared agreement on how a team uses branches, merges, and releases. Without one, you get long-running branches that rot, merges that break main, and releases no one can reason about.
Two engineers working on separate features, a bug that needs to ship today, and a release in three days. How your team handles this scenario is your Git workflow.
Core Concepts
What happens when everyone commits to main?
You can. Small teams do it. It works until it doesn't.
The moment two engineers push to main and one introduces a regression, you need to isolate who changed what, roll back that change without reverting the other, and ship a fix while the broken commit sits in history. On main, all of this is harder than it needs to be.
In the full tutorial
- How It Works in Practice
- Common Mistakes
- Tradeoffs
- Quick Reference