Today’s talk about setting up a development workflow for a new project reminded me of my promise to write the second part of this blog post. So here we go:
Installing Gitflow
Just read and follow the instructions in gitflow wiki. You may also want to setup very handy command completion, instructions are here.
Start using it
In the folder with your on-disk project (in our case it is C:\Program Files\ibm\lotus\notes\data\workspace\git_test) simply run the command git flow init and answer the questions (simply accepting the defaults is just fine). And that is all you need to do! From now on you can use all giflow commands in this project. If gitflow is completely new to you, here you can find some links to start with.
How does it work with Notes?
Just fine, I can suggest you to use my Notes to gitflow mapping. Important thing about using the version control with Notes is that you should stop using replication to exchange design changes in a template. Git repository should be the source for “building” nsf/ntf files. For example if a new developer starts his (or her) work on already running project, instead of creating a replica of the template to his/her local machine, he/she should clone a shared git repository to a new folder under C:\Program Files\ibm\lotus\notes\data\workspace and then (in Navigator) by right-clicking on this folder containing the cloned repo and selecting Team development/Associate with a New NSF… create new NSF file to work with. And after making changes and committing them to the repository, these changes should be pushed to the shared repository to make them available to other developers. And also to make them available to project management tools such as Redmine. Or to some code review tools. You DO use code review, right?:-)