Question

I have a situation where which git strategy is suitable to use?

Situation :

We have one application which has a git repository. In which we follow the branching strategy,

1. Branch : develop : used by all developers to implement the features

2. Branch : testing : where the code developed till current gets deployed to test the application.

3. Branch : production : After approval from testing team we merge testing branch to production & deploy it to production environment.

Problem :

1. Now we have 3 different installations of the production (site1.mainDomain.com, site2.mainDomain.com,site3.mainDomain.com),
   these 3 installations has different headers (logo, header color) for now.

2. There can be possibility that site1.mainDomain.com has some set of features that can be developed in future & can be only used for site1.mainDomain.com.

3. Some future features can be common for site1.mainDomain.com, site2.mainDomain.com but not for site3.mainDomain.com.

4. Now if there is any issue on production of site1.mainDomain.com & which is the major issue from the base branch, how we are gonna manage this thing.

So for achieving this which git strategy is useful?
I was reading about sub-modules, git sub-tree, git patches.. but little bit confused to make the decision. Please suggest the best possible solution and strategy to follow.

Thanks in advance.
Vijay

Answer 1

I strongly recommend to NOT use git to solve the problem. I can tell it from experience, as the project I am working on fell into the trap of needing to maintain two git branches for no good reason. Github Firewall Install (Github:FI, predecesor to Github Enterprise) also had the same problem.

I suggest to take a look at Feature Flag (Feature Toggle) pattern to solve your issue – http://martinfowler.com/bliki/FeatureToggle.html