Git feature branch to have develop branch as parent

Question

I have following structure, and would like to follow "gitflow".

  develop
  feature/101-my-new-feature
* master

Question: In order for branch feature to have develop branch as parent, would I need to checkout develop branch, prior to create all features? When merging features I want them to be merged towards develop branch.

Answer 1

Yes, if you are looking to merge back to develop after your feature is complete, you will have to checkout from that (this isn't strictly necessary from the point of view of Git itself, but from gitflow, it will make it easier).

A simplistic approach:

develop (v1.0)
  |
  |--> feature-1
         |
         | changes
         |
  |<-- feature-1
  |
  |
develop (v1.1)

Answer 2

A very typical way to create a feature branch from develop is to use git checkout -b , as hinted at by fredrik in comment.

git checkout -b <name-your-feature-branch-here> develop

where the first parameter is the name of the branch to create, and the second is the point from which the new branch should start (here: develop )

But as the second parameter can be omitted and defaults to the currently checked out commit/branch, if you have develop checked you can simply do

git checkout -b <name-your-feature-branch-here>

Also note that the above are the commands to create and checkout your new branch. But you could very well create without checking out with

# from develop branch
git branch <name-your-feature-branch-here>
# or from anywhere
git branch <name-your-feature-branch-here> develop

---

Lastly, what to do if you just created the new branch from the wrong branch? (let's say you mistakenly thought you were on develop and went for the short version) Just reset the branch to develop since you didn't commit on it yet:

git reset --hard develop