How to Create Public Branch in Git

Question

My team is increasing its usage of git and we'd like to start using a public branch, so that users can do their integrations/merges there, instead of master. How do I make a public branch?

Yes, I am a noob at this. Thanks for your help! :D

Biggs

What do you mean by public branch? Because any user who has access to the repo will have access to the branches that have been pushed to the repo – Electrotechnology

In git, a branch is a branch. There's no distinction between "public" and "not public" other than how you use them. It's just a branch. – Affettuoso

Yeah, I mean, the question is, is there the opposite of it -- the "private" branch? – Cirsoid

Answer 1

It depends on the scope of the group of developers to which you want to give access to the repo. If you are talking about an internal group, any repo you have on a server accessible by your employees is enough, as the branches will be there. In which case, the advice from @khmarbaise is accurate. Then, your users can fetch that branch, branch from it, you may merge those branches accordingly through a CI like Jenkins, etc.

On the other hand, if you're talking about open source then you could create a new public repo on github, bitbucket, or any other git host, and simply point your users to the repo. Users would create branches from the master branch of this repo and either push directly to master (yikes!) or submit their own branches/Pull Requests.

If you intend to impose branch-specific permissions then a server-side authorization layer is required, such as Gitolite (or others: http://alternativeto.net/software/gitolite/). With Github, one could control write access to one repo, allow users to fork their own, and merge Pull Requests being submitted.

Roquefort

I can elaborate upon whatever you like if you would like to clarify. – Roquefort

If you would include something about git not natively supporting branch permissions, I will accept your answer. – Biggs

Answer 2

You have to create the branch as usual:

git checkout -b TheBranchToUse

Afterwards you need to make it public to others:

git push -u origin TheBranchToUse

Dennadennard

Will this require other users to have write access to origin? – Biggs

Sure otherwise this is not possible to make something public. – Dennadennard

Read-only access would let users see the branch but not update it. – Astronaut

If you configure it that way yes. I assumed the default web front end of Git which does not support such things. – Dennadennard

Answer 3

I had the same problem in a teaching context: have the exercises and solutions for other professors and TA, and also have a "public branch" for students to download at first exercices, and then solutions after session hours. My solution using github:

• setup a private repo with all the branches, including the public one
• when you clone this repo, add another remote which is the public repo, and push to it the public branch

In the current install, I have:

$ git remote
cours
cours-public
$ git remote get-url cours
[email protected]:YannickChevalier/programmation-en-C.git
$ git remote get-url cours-public
[email protected]:YannickChevalier/programmation-en-C-CUPGE.git
$ git git branch -a
  configuration
  enonces
* enseignants
  solutions
  solutionsprof

Say enonces is the public branch and solutions is the private branch on which you do all the work and create the files. You update the public branch by using checkout from the non-public ones, such as

git checkout enonces
git checkout solutions -- *.pdf
git add .
git commit -m "update of solutions"
git push cours-public enonces

Note however that this solution is not perfect: git doesn't handle the meta-data of the files, which means that after this operation, it will assume it has to recompile everything because the LaTeX source files and the pdf are wiped and restored. You will have the same problem unless you set up 2 local directories: one for the compilation that stays on the same branch most of the time, and one set up specifically for the exchange between the public and private directories, and on which you never compile.

Tessitura