GitHub Project Management

[LofiCoochie]

I am trying to make a simple golang project in a github repository, and I am not that expert at git and github, I know the basic things though.

Before you go see this github account and it's repositories, this is just a dummy testing account I have been using for some time

This is my second big project and the previous one got a lot messy because the size of the project was only about 10MB but the repository size was about 150 MB, just because of the huge commit history.

When I started the project I created 12 files and for the 4 months that I worked on that project, there were never less than or more than 12 files in that project, I worked in those 12 while for the whole time

This time it is not only me coding on that project, a few of my friends are also going to be working on it. (they have pretty similar git experience as me).
We searched around google and found 1 simple strategy for helping with this;
We thought that on github, we can create the main branch and for any feature that we want to implement to the project we will make a separate branch on github for it like if we want to integrate database into our project we make a feature/database branch on github for it.

We were thinking we would assign each one of use with different features and we will work on different branches for those and whenever someone get's a task done we will merge that feature into the main branch.

Now the problem are as follow:

1. None of us know how we are going to maintain these feature branches and then merge them into the main branch properly
2. We want it so that we can make many commits in the feature branches but when we merge that branch into the main branch, we only make 1 commit which highlights the work for all the commits done in the feature branch
3. We don't know how we will merge the commits from feature branches to main branch.

If any one can explain(a little in depth) of how we can manage our project and it's workflow in github, it would mean alot to us, any help is appreciated.

Thanks!

[stefanhaller]

Did you accidentally post this in the wrong place by any chance? I don't see what this has to do with lazygit.

But while you're here, let me just answer this bit:

but when we merge that branch into the main branch, we only make 1 commit which highlights the work for all the commits done in the feature branch

I strongly advise against that. A detailed commit history is a good thing (if the commits are well-structured and have good commit messages), it can be an invaluable source of information later.

[LofiCoochie]

No I meant to post here, I am trying to get knowledge about how projects that have been there for a long time manage their github repo,
and also thanks for answering anyway.
But aside that I still have 1 problem left, how to manage proper and easy to contribute workflow of a github repo

[DusanLesan]

We follow a similar approach to what you've started doing. We actually use a develop branch instead of main, where we add all our changes, and we only merge into main after extensive testing. We merge fix/feature branches into it only through pull requests. Feature branches are branched out of develop (main in your case) before starting work on the feature, and all changes related to it also go through pull requests. It is important to keep it in sync with the develop branch to avoid big conflicts and to properly adjust to changes made to develop branch while the feature was in development.

Image resembling our flow

[LofiCoochie]

Thanks alot for the help man, really helpful.
Can you also recommend some kind of youtube video or some kind of online post about this?
Like how to manage the flow or something that shows a simlated environment like this?
That would be really helpfull.
Thanks alot for your help!

[DusanLesan]

Sorry, I did not encounter any videos describing this. But this is a very common flow so I guess there must be some. Also the above image I found online shows exactly what we are doing. The only part I would like to see on the image is the part where feature branches are regularly synced with the develop branch. I had some huge issues if I forget to merge develop branch for few weeks and feature branch gets several hundred commits behind. Having conflicts is normal, but more out of sync, more trouble you will have fixing them.

[DusanLesan]

https://www.atlassian.com/git/tutorials/comparing-workflows/gitflow-workflow

[DusanLesan]

This one looks good too: https://www.abtasty.com/blog/git-branching-strategies/

[LofiCoochie]

Thanks bro!
It helped alot.