Git Workflows

So far you have been working with two related repositories, pretending that each was ‘owned’ by a separate person on a team. Of course, there might be any number of individuals on a team, each with their own repository clone. Unfortunately, it can become difficult to coordinate changes if everyone is regularly committing to their repositories.

Figure: Distributed Repositories
In a truly distributed workflow, each team member is responsible for pulling changes from every other team member as needed.

To simplify the workflow, one approach is to dedicate someone as a repository maintainer who is responsible for pulling all changes from everyone else's repositories. Everyone else then regularly pulls from this individual to keep their repositories up to date.

Figure: Distributed Repositories with Dedicated Maintainer
A simpler approach is for one team member to maintain a central repository from which everyone else pulls.

The most common workflow is to host a central repository on a server accessible to everyone on the team. This arrangement requires a particular configuration of the central repository which allows it to be pushed to instead of just pulled from. We will discuss how this works in the next lessons.

Figure: Central Repository
The most common workflow is to have a central repository that everyone can pull from and push to.