Purpose of core stage command?

[togume]

Excited to try git reflow as a tool for our team. Quick question, someone found the stage command, but there's no information on it on the base README and the workflow help states Merge and deploy a feature branch to a staging branch.

How is the stage command supposed to be used? In our use case we'd thought about deploying the current feature branch to a staging environment and don't quite grasp the value of the stage command. The one way we thought it might be helpful is in the case where we want to stage and test multiple feature branches all at once before promoting to master. I'd be happy to document the usage once I understand it better.

[nhance]

The goal of this is to merge the feature branch into staging and kick off the deploy from the command line. It's intent is that teams don't always have CD setup for staging (or oftentimes production) so this lightweight command allows you to put some structure behind the staging process.

With git reflow philosophy, staging is a disposable branch, meaning it should be thought of as something that can be recreated at any time, allowing it to be used for exploratory or experimental work as needed. It is fully intended that in-progress branches can be put into staging so we utilize a regular merge (not squash) for staging, as it is impossible to know when work is complete before it has passed through staging.

Only on merge to master does our default process use a squash merge. Because only at that point can you confidently combine changes into a single atomic commit.

stage runs off the following workflow:
https://github.com/reenhanced/gitreflow/blob/master/lib/git_reflow/workflows/core.rb#L250

which has a dependency on the deploy command, which you can see here:
https://github.com/reenhanced/gitreflow/blob/master/lib/git_reflow/workflows/core.rb#L220

deploy will ask for the command used to deploy on first run if it doesn't exist and uses that to execute deploys. Note that you can have a unique command for each environment, but only a single command is accepted.

[togume]

@nhance - great response. Thanks for taking the time to explain this. I'm going to close this issue because it's now comprehensive enough and available for anyone that takes the time to look for the stage command.