Page 5 - Git

Merging an entire feature branch just to ship one hotfix drags unwanted commits, conflicts, and noise into your history. Git cherry-pick applies exactly one commit onto another branch, with its own SHA and traceable origin through the -x flag. This article shows how to use cherry-pick deliberately for hotfixes, resolve conflicts, and avoid divergent history.

Monorepo or polyrepo is one of the most consequential architecture decisions for Git projects, because it shapes commit behavior, access rights, CI/CD pipelines, and daily developer routine for years to come. This article compares both strategies against concrete criteria such as team size, coupling, and tooling, and shows how Magento agencies can sensibly split client projects and custom modules between app/code and their own Composer packages.

Deploying Magento stores through FTP uploads or manual file copying from a developer's own machine destroys any traceability of what code is actually live. This article shows how annotated Git tags serve as an immutable production truth, how CI/CD pipelines automatically react to branch and tag pushes, how a clear branch-to-environment mapping cleanly separates staging, review environments, and production, and why a rollback under pressure is nothing more than redeploying the previous tag.

A commit without a ref is practically invisible to Git. Branches, tags and HEAD are all just named pointers that turn a loose pile of objects into a navigable history. This article shows how .git/refs/heads, .git/refs/tags and packed-refs are laid out on disk, how HEAD resolves to a commit in two hops, and how to inspect and manipulate refs directly with git show-ref, git symbolic-ref and git update-ref.

Merge conflicts are part of everyday life for every Git team and scare off many developers unnecessarily. This article explains how to read conflict markers, when a graphical merge tool like VS Code, Meld or PhpStorm pays off, how git rerere resolves recurring conflicts automatically, and which strategies help teams reduce the number of conflicts in feature branches from the start.

Submitting a feature branch with a chaotic commit history for review costs the team time and burns trust. This guide walks step by step through using git rebase -i to reorder, combine, rename, or remove commits, resolve conflicts safely, and undo a botched rebase at any point using reflog.

Branches, commits, diffs and merges look like independent concepts, but technically they are all just pointers into the same object graph. This article deliberately drops below the add, commit and branch abstraction and uses git cat-file and git hash-object to show directly against the object store how blobs, trees and commits are built, how they reference each other, and why Git addresses its objects by SHA-1 or SHA-256 instead of by filename.

A poorly maintained .gitignore causes generated files, credentials, and IDE configuration to accidentally end up in the repository, or forces teammates to constantly discard local changes. This article explains global and project-specific rules, exact pattern syntax, the risk of already-tracked files, and a practical baseline for PHP and Magento projects.

Inconsistent branch names look harmless until a deployment pipeline targets the wrong environment or an automated cleanup script deletes a branch that's still active. Clear prefixes such as feature, bugfix, and hotfix, combined with ticket IDs from Jira or GitHub Issues, create traceability, enable reliable CI automation, and can be enforced across the whole team with one simple naming check hook.

A tangled Git history with hundreds of WIP commits makes bisect useless, reviews tedious, and blame unreliable. Clear conventions such as atomic commits, rebasing before merge, and disciplined commit messages turn the log into a dependable tool for debugging and traceability, without slowing the team down.