ReinH | A Git Workflow for Agile Teams

Sharing of good work-flow is one of the keys to adoption and effective use of new technology.

Git is a relatively new technology and it’s workflow is not a topic that is discussed often in the Rails community SO it intrigued me when Bryan Liles mentioned the above article by ReinH in one of his videos. I highly recommend giving it a read as it presents some interesting ideas.

Here’s an example. Recently I had a need to build an ecommerce site. Spree is a nice open source ecommerce system built on Rails… however, it does not suit my needs perfectly and when I started looking around the code, I found some code that could be refactored to act more effectively.

I like to commit often… sometimes a little too often. Sometimes I’ll make a change, commit it, do a browser check to see if it works, go back, fix any errors, commit again, and repeat the cycle. The result of my frequent committing is that I have a ton of tiny commits that others won’t really find useful following along. If they tried, they’d understand, but they’d waste a ton of time because the commits are small and often filled with errors that are fixed on the next 2 or 3 commits.

What should I do? The article by ReinH proposes an answer to the problem. Go check it out! Be sure to not be a passive blog reader. Please leave feedback on what you thought. It acts as fuel for bloggers.

When developing a rails app, it’s a good idea to “freeze” your app. What this means is that you’re making a copy of rails in your RAILS_APP_ROOT/vendors/rails directory. This will help reduce your dependencies… just in case you deploy your app to a machine that does not have the version of Rails you used to develop it (older or newer.)

This article covers the topic really well: Softies on Rails: Freezing Your Rails Application.

One thing it doesn’t cover is how to freeze a specific version of rails. It’s pretty simple:

rake rails:freeze:gems VERSION=2.1.0

This will allow you to run your app against the version of rails your app was written for.