When you work on a project is Good Practice to Create and Switch to a New Branch every time your are Developing or Testing something New. This permit to leave Untouched your Current Work on the Master Branch and Experiment on the New One.
Here are Shown the Basic Commands on Branching.
To Create a New Branch:
git branch testing
Switching to a Branch:
git checkout testing
There is also a Synthetic Command that allow to Create and Switch in a single Step:
git checkout -b testing
The -b flag tell Git the necessity to Create the Branch before Switching to.
Now to have a list of all your local Branches give the command:
git branch
Instead, if you have some remote Branches:
git branch -r
After you have Completed your Development on the Testing Branch and you want to Merge your Code into the Master Branch.
First, you Add and Commit Changes on the Current Branch:
git commit -a -m "Completed Development on the Branch"
Next you Switch back to the Master Branch and Merge the Testing Branch into the Master one.
git checkout master
git merge testing
After you Merged the Branch it doesn’t need anymore so you can Safely Delete it by:
git branch -d testing
And if you don’t need any more a Branch that still is Not Merged you can Force Deletion with the Flag -D:
git branch -D needlessBranch
To see all Branches that contain Work you haven’t still Merged in you execute:
git branch --no-merged
Instead, to see all Branches already Merged in:
git branch --merged