Git practices that will boost your Developer Collaboration

Version Control is everything when it comes to team collaboration

This post is first posted on https://tech.jacobmziya.xyz/git-practices-that-will-boost-your-developer-collaboration

In this post, we list some of the best practices you should adopt to make the best of Git.

Git is a powerful version control system that allows developers to track changes to their code and collaborate with others on software projects. Even if you don’t belong to a team, it is best to already grow these into habits in your solo projects. These are some of the best practices for using Git.

1. Have a branching strategy in place

It’s great to have a strategy like Gitflow, to manage the development of your code. This helps with keeping your code clean and makes sure that bug fixes and new features are isolated and you stand fewer chances of coming across unnecessary conflicts.

2. Always write clear commit messages

“Removing a semi-colon” isn’t helping anyone? If your commit messages clearly describe what has been modified (in brief of course) it helps other developers to know what you have done and also keeps your commit history organized and clear.

3. Use pull requests

When working with a team, pull requests are a good idea to keep in check. Making sure that changes abide by the coding standards and policies of the entire project and providing team members with the opportunity to provide feedback before merging. This can be included in policies.

4. Keep your repository clean

How many times have you found your repository list of branches to keep growing with branches you are not using anymore? Deleting old/ unused branches keeps the repository size small and organized.

5. Use Gitignore files

This is one of the most important practices that prevent you from putting out files to the world that don’t need sharing. Such as database credentials or temporary files. I develop a lot in Ruby on Rails, and whenever you create a Rails project, there is a database.yml file created in the config directory. The first thing I do is always create a copy of it and ignore the .yml file to avoid pushing it to Git as it holds my DB credentials.

There are other best practices you can choose to add to this list, but I hope following these Git best practices help you make the most of Git and collaborate more effectively with your team.

Great coding Guys..!!!