Tag: version control

Oh. My. God!  I’ve been using git for years now and I only learned this today – git branch names support forward slashes! How awesome is that?!  You can do things like this:

$ git checkout -b feature/foobar

Grouping branches like this is much easier indeed!

I came across this while reading CakeDC’s CakePHP Plugin Standard.  Searching around to find more details, I see that there are a few potential issues with this naming convention, as tools occasionally break (composer, IDEs, etc).   However, these problems are fixed by tool vendors.  Looking into it even further, I found the following description in the book “Version Control with Git: Powerful tools and techniques for collaborative software development” (Google Books preview):

Dos and Don’ts in Branch Names

Branch names must conform to a few simple rules.

• You can use the forward slash (/) to create a hierarchical name scheme.  However, the name cannot end with a slash.
• The name cannot start with a minus sign (-).
• No slash-separated component can begin with a dot (.).  A branch name such as feature/.new is invalid.
• The name cannot contain two consecutive dots (..) anywhere.
• Further, the name cannot contain:
  • Any space or other whitespace character
  • A character that has special meaning to Git, including the tilde (~), caret (^), colon (:), question mark (?), asterisk (*), and open bracket ([).
  • An ASCII control character, which is any byte with a value lower than \040 octal, or the DEL character (\177 octal)

These branch name rules are enforced by the git check-ref-format plumbing command, and they are designed to ensure that each branch name is both easily typed and usable as a filename within the .git directory and scripts.

So, as you can see, you aren’t even limited to the single forward slash. Even things like this work just fine:

$ git checkout -b Leonid/ideas/feature/foobar

But remember, just because you CAN do something, doesn’t necessarily mean you SHOULD.  Have a look at this StackOverflow discussion about git branch naming best practices for more understanding on what you should and shouldn’t do.