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Branching-Strategy

Jonathan Miller edited this page 2026-05-25 04:58:22 +00:00

Table of Contents

• Branching Strategy
• Branch flow
• Protected branches
• Developer workflow
• Automated cascading
• Pre-release channels
• Branch protection enforcement

Branching Strategy

All Moko Consulting repositories follow this branching model.

Branch flow

feature/* --> dev --> main

Protected branches

Branch	Direct push	Who can push	Merge via
main	Blocked	jmiller (whitelisted)	PR merge only
dev	Blocked	jmiller (whitelisted)	PR merge from feature/*
rc/*	Blocked	jmiller (whitelisted)	PR merge only
alpha/*	Blocked	jmiller (whitelisted)	PR merge only
beta/*	Blocked	jmiller (whitelisted)	PR merge only
feature/*	Open	Anyone	N/A (source branch)
version/*	Auto-created	CI bot	Auto-created by auto-release

Developer workflow

1. Start from dev:

   git checkout dev && git pull
   git checkout -b feature/my-change
   

2. Make changes and commit to feature/*

3. Open a PR: feature/my-change -> dev

4. After review and merge, open a PR: dev -> main (when ready for release)

5. Merging to main triggers auto-release.yml which:

   • Bumps version (minor)
   • Builds ZIP/tar.gz
   • Creates Gitea release
   • Updates updates.xml
   • Recreates dev from main

Automated cascading

cascade-dev.yml runs on every push to main and forward-merges changes to dev. If there are conflicts, it creates a PR automatically.

This ensures dev is never behind main after a release.

Pre-release channels

Use pre-release.yml (manual dispatch) to build from any branch:

Channel	Tag	Use case
development	development	Nightly/latest from dev
alpha	alpha	Early testing
beta	beta	Feature-complete testing
release-candidate	release-candidate	Final validation

Pre-releases cascade: stable deletes all, rc deletes beta+alpha+dev, etc.

Branch protection enforcement

Branch protection is applied org-wide via the Gitea API. The jmiller user is whitelisted for push on all protected branches because:

• CI workflows (cascade-dev, auto-release, pre-release) authenticate with GA_TOKEN which belongs to jmiller
• All other contributors must use PRs

To verify protection on a repo:

curl -sf -H "Authorization: token $TOKEN" \
  "https://git.mokoconsulting.tech/api/v1/repos/MokoConsulting/REPO/branch_protections" | jq