Git Version Control Cookbook

How to do it...

Perform the following steps to manage your local branches:

1. Whenever you start working on a bug fix or a new feature in your project, you should create a branch. You can do so using the following code:

$ git branch newBugFix 
$ git branch 
* master 
 newBugFix 

2. The newBugFix branch points to the current HEAD you were on at the time of the creation. You can see the HEAD with git log -1:

$ git log -1 newBugFix --format=format:%H 
25fe20b2dbb20cac8aa43c5ad64494ef8ea64ffc 

3. If you want to add a description to the branch, you can do this with the --edit-description option for the git branch command:

$ git branch --edit-description newBugFix

4. The previous command will open an editor where you can type in a description:

Refactoring ...