Hotfixes

Hotfixes are landings on the master branch which happen outside of the regular development on develop. They are merged back to develop as well.

The purpose of a hotfix is either:

• to land a bustage fix when an earlier merge to master broke something on production, or
• to land a small and much needed feature off-cycle, without having to merge and deploy the entire develop branch.

Start a hotfix branch

Assume that after we merged develop to master and pushed to production, an issue is discovered, and bug 600000 is filed.

$ git flow hotfix start 600000-missing-import

Switched to a new branch 'hotfix/600000-missing-import'

Summary of actions:
- A new branch 'hotfix/600000-missing-import' was created, based on 'master'
- You are now on branch 'hotfix/600000-missing-import'

Follow-up actions:
- Bump the version number now!
- Start committing your hot fixes
- When done, run:

     git flow hotfix finish '600000-missing-import'

Work on a fix on the hotfix branch

Refer to the Contribute page for instructions on how to make changes, commit them and create patches. Here's a quick recap:

# ...write code...
git add manage.py
git commit -m "Add a missing import"
git diff master...HEAD > patch.diff
# ...attach the patch on bugzilla and get review...

Rinse and repeat until you get a r+.

Squash your commits into a single one

If you've made more than one commit, you'll want to squash then into a single one.

$ git rebase -i master

Change

pick 458dbf5 Add a missing import
pick b7e73d8 Explicitly import datetime.datetime

to

pick 458dbf5 Add a missing import
fixup b7e73d8 Explicitly import datetime.datetime

(Note the fixup in the second line.)

Adjust the commit message

$ git commit --amend

The final commit message should include:

• the bug number
• short summary of the changes made on the feature branch
• reviews (e.g. r=stas)
• (optional) longer description separated by a blank line.

Example:

Bug 600000 - Add a missing import, r=stas

The manage.py file requires the datetime module to be installed.

Close the hotfix branch

You're ready to merge your hotfix branch onto master and develop.

$ git flow hotfix finish -n 600000-missing-import 

Switched to branch 'master'
Merge made by recursive.
 manage.py |    1 +
 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
Switched to branch 'develop'
Merge made by recursive.
 manage.py |    1 +
 1 files changed, 1 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
Deleted branch hotfix/600000-missing-import (was 31565e0).

Summary of actions:
- Latest objects have been fetched from 'origin'
- Hotfix branch has been merged into 'master'
- Hotfix branch has been back-merged into 'develop'
- Hotfix branch 'hotfix/600000-missing-import' has been deleted

Note the finish -n in the flow command. This will prevent git flow from automatically tagging the merge commit on the master branch. We do this because the tag naming scheme used by git flow is to use the name of the hotfix branch, which isn't really what we want. We will tag ourselves in the next step.

Tag the release on master

When tagging, remember to use git tag -a, which will create an annotated tag object (as opposed to a lightweight tag created by git tag).

The name of the tag depends on whether you're doing a bustage fix, or are trying to land a feature off-cycle.

Bustage fix

Use the last release's tag and append .x to it, where x is the smallest integer available. Example:

$ git tag -a 2011-05-23.1 master

Feature landing

Tag this as a regular release, i.e. with a date. Example:

$ git tag -a 2011-05-24 master