Git Workflow

A change moves through four places. Only the last one is shared with others; everything before push can still be rewritten freely.

sequenceDiagram
  participant W as Working tree
  participant I as Index (staging)
  participant L as Local repository
  participant R as Remote
  W->>I: git add
  I->>L: git commit
  L->>R: git push
  R->>L: git fetch
  L->>W: git switch / git merge
  Note over W,R: git pull = fetch + merge (or rebase)

Place	Contains	Inspect with
Working tree	The files you edit.	`git status`, `git diff`
Index	The snapshot the next commit will contain.	`git diff --staged`
Local repository	All commits; `HEAD` points to the checked-out one.	`git log --oneline --graph`
Remote	The shared copy, mirrored locally as `origin/<branch>`.	`git log origin/main`

Feature branch workflow

git switch -c feature/login        # new branch from the current one
git add -p                         # stage changes hunk by hunk
git commit -m "Add login form"
git push -u origin feature/login   # -u: later pushes need no arguments

Then open a pull request, or merge locally:

git switch main
git pull
git merge feature/login
git push
git branch -d feature/login