Build + deploy pipeline for RAP application

[Michiel-s]

Inspiration from other project:

[FrankTeusink]

That's how I also see it. Though on RAP repository we currently have

• main branch, last commit Aug 15 2021,
• development branch, last commit Jan 17 2023,
• and a lot of other branches, of various ages.

So I think we should, for now have

• development branch as our core/master/main branch to collect all tested and approved code
• keep the real main branch as-is, and maybe discuss the intentional differences between main and development
• create feature branches based on development.

[Michiel-s]

I know how it is at this moment, but I wanted to propose a target/soll situation.

Personally I don't see use for distinction between main and development branch. In both you tested/approved code.

For smaller teams a main-branch only strategy (a.k.a. (GitHub Flow branching strategy)[https://www.flagship.io/git-branching-strategies/]) works best.

GitHub Flow is a simpler alternative to GitFlow ideal for smaller teams as they don’t need to manage multiple versions.

Read this article about different branching strategies: https://www.flagship.io/git-branching-strategies/

In the picture I shared above, you can see that we use 'release tags' to trigger deployment to production. Main branch is always automatically deployed to a staging environment.

[FrankTeusink]

I agree. But first wanted to find out why we had separate main/development.

[FrankTeusink]

Also, for feature branches, I propose to put a prefix in the branch names of feature branches

Like

• feature/setup_GitHub_actions

That way we can auto-deploy from these branches to development environment(s)

[FrankTeusink]

So if we do GitHub flow, we need to decide what out 'main' branch is. Candidates are master and development. I see development is some 60 commits ahead of master. But also master is 2 pull requests (Aug 2021, Stef) ahead of development. So that needs some analysis and brain searching.