Important

⚠️ git-flow has moved to git-flow-next!

This repository is no longer maintained. The wonderful team at Tower has created git-flow-next — a modern, fully customizable evolution of git-flow, built on a generic branch dependency model. It’s fully backward compatible with git-flow, open source, and actively maintained.

Get started with git-flow-next:

• Website: https://git-flow.sh
• GitHub: https://github.com/gittower/git-flow-next
• Evolution Story: Read about the journey from git-flow → git-flow-avh → git-flow-next in their blog post

Why git-flow-next?

git-flow-next builds upon the foundation laid by the original git-flow, offering:

• Full customization of branch names and workflow
• Modern implementation with active maintenance
• Backward compatibility with existing git-flow workflows
• Upcoming features like stacked branches and topic branch syncing

Thank you ❤️

To everyone who has used, contributed to, and supported git-flow over the past 15+ years — thank you! Your feedback, contributions, and adoption made git-flow one of the most widely-used Git workflow tools. Special thanks to Peter van der Does for maintaining git-flow-avh, and to the folks at Tower for carrying the torch forward with git-flow-next.

---

(Below, you’ll find the original documentation for historical reference.)

---

git-flow

A collection of Git extensions to provide high-level repository operations for Vincent Driessen's branching model.

Getting started

For the best introduction to get started with git flow, please read Jeff Kreeftmeijer's blog post:

http://jeffkreeftmeijer.com/2010/why-arent-you-using-git-flow/

Or have a look at one of these screen casts:

• How to use a scalable Git branching model called git-flow (by Build a Module)
• A short introduction to git-flow (by Mark Derricutt)
• On the path with git-flow (by Dave Bock)

Installing git-flow

See the Wiki for up-to-date Installation Instructions.

Integration with your shell

For those who use the Bash or ZSH shell, please check out the excellent work on the git-flow-completion project by bobthecow. It offers tab-completion for all git-flow subcommands and branch names.

FAQ

See the FAQ section of the project Wiki.

License terms

git-flow is published under the liberal terms of the BSD License, see the LICENSE file. Although the BSD License does not require you to share any modifications you make to the source code, you are very much encouraged and invited to contribute back your modifications to the community, preferably in a Github fork, of course.

Initialization

To initialize a new repo with the basic branch structure, use:

	git flow init [-d]

This will then interactively prompt you with some questions on which branches you would like to use as development and production branches, and how you would like your prefixes be named. You may simply press Return on any of those questions to accept the (sane) default suggestions.

The -d flag will accept all defaults.

Creating feature/release/hotfix/support branches

• To list/start/finish feature branches, use:

    git flow feature
    git flow feature start <name> [<base>]
    git flow feature finish <name>
  

  For feature branches, the <base> arg must be a commit on develop.

• To push/pull a feature branch to the remote repository, use:

    git flow feature publish <name>
      git flow feature pull <remote> <name>
  

• To list/start/finish release branches, use:

    git flow release
    git flow release start <release> [<base>]
    git flow release finish <release>
  

  For release branches, the <base> arg must be a commit on develop.

• To list/start/finish hotfix branches, use:

    git flow hotfix
    git flow hotfix start <release> [<base>]
    git flow hotfix finish <release>
  

  For hotfix branches, the <base> arg must be a commit on master.

• To list/start support branches, use:

    git flow support
    git flow support start <release> <base>
  

  For support branches, the <base> arg must be a commit on master.