Git 5: Branches

One of the most useful features of Git is called branching. Branching allows you to diverge from the main line of work and edit or update your code and files (e.g. to test out a new analysis or some experimental feature) without affecting your main work. If the work you did in the branch turns out to be useful you can merge that back into your main branch. On the other hand, if the work didn’t turn out as planned, you can simply delete the branch and continue where you left off in your main line of work. Another use case for branching is when you are working in a project with multiple people. Branching can be a way of compartmentalizing your team’s work on different parts of the project and enables merging back into the main branch in a controlled fashion; we will learn more about this in the section about working remotely.

  • Let’s start trying out branching! We can see the current branch by running:
git branch

This tells us that there is only the main branch at the moment.

Main and Master
If your branch is called master instead of main that’s perfectly fine as well, but do check out the Git section of the pre-course setup for more details about the choice of default branch names.

  • Let’s make a new branch:
git branch test_alignment

  • Run git branch again to see the available branches. Do you note which one is selected as the active branch?

  • Let’s move to our newly created branch using the checkout command:

git checkout test_alignment

Tip
You can create and checkout a new branch in one line with git checkout -b branch_name.

Let’s add some changes to our new branch! We’ll use this to try out a different set of parameters on the sequence alignment step of the case study project.

  • Edit the Snakefile so that the shell command of the align_to_genome rule looks like this (add the --very-sensitive-local option):
bowtie2 --very-sensitive-local -x results/bowtie2/{config[genome_id]} -U {input.fastq} > {output} 2>{log}

  • Add and commit the change!

  • To get a visual view of your branches and commits you can use the command:

git log --graph --all --oneline

It is often useful to see what differences exist between branches. You can use the diff command for this:

git diff main

This shows the difference between the active branch (test_alignment) and main on a line-per-line basis. Do you see which lines have changed between test_alignment and main branches?

Tip
We can also add the --color-words flag to git diff, which instead displays the difference on a word-per-word basis rather than line-per-line.

Note
Git is constantly evolving, along with some of its commands. While the checkout command is quite versatile (it’s used for more than just switching branches), this versatility can sometimes be confusing. The Git team thus added a new command, git switch, that can be used instead. This command is still experimental, however, so we have opted to stick with checkout for the course - for now.

Now, let’s assume that we have tested our code and the alignment analysis is run successfully with our new parameters. We thus want to merge our work into the main branch. It is good to start with checking the differences between branches (as we just did) so that we know what we will merge.

  • Checkout the branch you want to merge into, i.e. main:
git checkout main
  • To merge, run the following code:
git merge test_alignment

Run git log --graph --all --oneline again to see how the merge commit brings back the changes made in test_alignment to main.

Tip
If working on different features or parts of an analysis on different branches, and at the same time maintaining a working main branch for the stable code, it is convenient to periodically merge the changes made to main into relevant branches (i.e. the opposite to what we did above). That way, you keep your experimental branches up-to-date with the newest changes and make them easier to merge into main when time comes.

  • If we do not want to do more work in test_alignment we can delete that branch:
git branch -d test_alignment
  • Run git log --graph --all --oneline again. Note that the commits and the graph history are still there? A branch is simply a pointer to a specific commit, and that pointer has been removed.

Tip
There are many types of so-called “branching models”, each with varying degrees of complexity depending on the developer’s needs and the number of collaborators. While there certainly isn’t a single branching model that can be considered to be the “best”, it is very often most useful to keep it simple. An example of a simple and functional model is to have a main branch that is always working (i.e. can successfully run all your code and without known bugs) and develop new code on feature branches (one new feature per branch). Feature branches are short-lived, meaning that they are deleted once they are merged into main.

Quick recap
We have now learned how to divide our work into branches and how to manage them:

  • git branch <branch> creates a new branch.
  • git checkout <branch> moves the repository to the state in which the specified branch is currently in.
  • git merge <branch> merges the specified branch into the current one.