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# What is the GitLab Flow

- A simplified branching strategy
- All features and fixes first go to master
- Allows for 'production' or 'stable' branches
- Bug fixes/hot fix patches are cherry-picked from master

## Feature branches

- Create a feature/bugfix branch to do all work
- Use merge requests to merge to master

![inline](gitlab_flow/feature_branches.png)

## Production branch

- One, long-running production release branch
  as opposed to individual stable branches
- Consider creating a tag for each version that gets deployed

## Production branch

![inline](gitlab_flow/production_branch.png)

## Release branch

- Useful if you release software to customers
- When preparing a new release, create stable branch
  from master
- Consider creating a tag for each version
- Cherry-pick critical bug fixes to stable branch for patch release
- Never commit bug fixes directly to stable branch

## Release branch

![inline](gitlab_flow/release_branches.png)

## More details

For more information read through the [GitLab Flow](../../workflow/gitlab_flow.md)
documentation.