如何使用git branch使用不同的env管理应用程序的更改？

Question

I have a Rails app with two environments (staging and production) . I have my project in Bitbucket. I have created a branch (staging-branch) from master which I use for deploying in staging environment.

Once my staging works I would need to deploy the few of the changes from staging to production and not the whole changes that I made for the staging. In this case, if I create a pull request in bitbucket it takes all the files that were changed and adds it to be pulled from master.

However, I want to move only certain files to the production. How can I do this? What approach should I follow for such cases?

Answer 1

There are two approaches I would take to this.

The first, and preferable, one is to use proper, atomic feature- and hotfix branches. These would contain any and all changes required to implement a certain feature, or fix a certain issue. Once you have merged this branch into staging and verified it works the way you want, you can simply merge the same branch into production .

This requires a certain amount of diligence about keeping your commit history clean, and not mixing up different features or fixes in the same branch.

At work, we use GitHub Flow with great results: https://guides.github.com/introduction/flow/

The second one, if you are developing directly on the staging branch, is to create a new branch and use git cherry-pick to select only the changes that you want to go into production , and then merge this new branch in.

Here is the manual for git cherry-pick : http://git-scm.com/docs/git-cherry-pick

The latter one certainly feels like a hack, and might give you problems with keeping track of how staging and production have diverged--and although I would not suggest it as a permanent solution, I included it as an option that can be used to solve your immediate problem.