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Managing branches

Creating a new branch

In order to create a new branch at your current location, you can use the git branch command. You can also create a branch at a different location. Refer to the examples below:

# Create the branch 'development' at current location (HEAD)
git branch development

# Create the branch 'bugfix' at commit with hash 'ab245'
git branch bugfix ab245

When subsequently calling git branch without an argument, Git shows all your branches, along with the active one:

  development
* main

Switching to a different branch

In order to start writing commits into the new development branch, we first need to switch to it. In Git this is called 'checking out' and is accomplished using the git switch command. You can check out commits, as well as branches. But to keep things simple, we will stick to branches for now. 

# Checkout (i.e. switch to) the 'development' branch
git switch development

# Or using `checkout`
git checkout branch
git switch or git checkout?

A lot of online resources will point you towards the git checkout command. This still works fine in most cases. There is, however, a lot going on under the hood that makes the two commands perform differently from each other.

Stick to git switch, as it is the recommended approach in newer Git versions, unless you need specific options that only git checkout provides.

Example

Below is a simple visualisation to demonstrate this process:

  1. git init
    • A new repository is made. main is the default branch.
  2. Two commits are made on the main branch.
    • Therefore, twice, a file has been added/modified; staged with git add and then committed with git commit.
  3. A new branch called development is made with git branch development.
  4. The development branch is switched to with git switch development.
  5. Three commits are made on the development branch.
    • Therefore, three times, a file has been added/modified; staged with git add and then committed with git commit.
gitGraph
  commit id: "main_1"
  commit id: "main_2"
  branch development
  checkout development
  commit id: "dev_1"
  commit id: "dev_2"
  commit id: "dev_3"

Tip

To create a new branch, and immediately check it out, you can use the following shorthand: git checkout -b <new_branch_name>:

# Create the branch 'development' and immediately check it out
git checkout -b development

To forcibly move a branch around, you can use: git branch -f <branch_name> <new_location>:

# Set the current state of branch 'development' to be commit with hash 'td364' instead of HEAD
git branch -f development td364