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Collaborating with Git

If you’re working on a data model as part of a team you can take inspiration from the Gitflow Workflow to effectively collaborate and develop your data model. The following is a recommendation, so feel free to use another approach if there’s one that suits your team better.

  • Start with a main branch for your team. Because there is already a main branch in the repository, we suggest you create a branch from the main branch and name it something like project-name-main or team-name-main.
  • Next Analyst 1 is working on table_a, while Analyst 2 is working on table_b.
    • Analyst 1 should create a branch off project-name-main called a1/model-a-development, prefixing the branch name with their initials and a slash a1/.
    • Analyst 2 should create a branch off project-name-main called a2/model-b-development, prefixing the branch name with their initials and a slash a2/.
  • When they have completed the development of their respective models, each analyst should raise a pull request for their respective branches and set the base branch to project-name-main.
  • The analysts, or someone else in the team, can then review the pull request and quality assure the work.
  • When a pull request has been merged into project-name-main, keep other feature branches like a2/model-b-development up to date by merging project-name-main into it. You can do this using the terminal or in the pull request itself where you will see a button at the bottom of the pull request page that says Update branch. If you do use the pull request to update the branch, you’ll need to run git pull locally. When the data model is complete and all changes have been merged into project-name-main, you can request review from the data modelling team who will check it over before it gets merged into main.

Creating branches

First make sure you’re on the main branch by running the following in terminal:

git status

If you’re not, run:

git checkout main

git pull

Next create your project-name-main branch (don’t forget to update the project name in the command) by running:

git checkout -b <project-name-main>

From the project-name-main branch, create your development branch by running:

git checkout -b <a1/model-a-development>

replacing a1 with your initals.

Updating your branch with main

When working on your models it is likely that your branch will get out of date with the main branch. To update you branch with the latest changes from main open a terminal and run the following:

Check your working tree, commit/push any changes if required

git status

Switch to the main branch and collect the latest changes, if any

git switch main
git fetch
git pull

Switch back to your branch and merge in the changes from main

git switch <your_branch>
git merge main -m "update branch with main"

At this point you may have merge conflicts that need to be resolved; please see GitHub resolve merge conflicts. If required, ask for help on the #ask-data-modelling slack channel.

This page was last reviewed on 7 August 2023. It needs to be reviewed again on 7 August 2024 by the page owner #ask-data-modelling .