Managing your local branches

Suppose you just have your local Git repository, and, at the moment, you have no intention of sharing the code with others; you can, however, easily share the knowledge you have while working with a repository with one or more remotes. Local branches with no remotes work exactly in this fashion. As you can see in the examples, we are cloning a repository, and thus we have a remote.

Let's start by creating a few local branches.

Getting ready

Use the following command to clone the jgit repository to match:

$ git clone https://git.eclipse.org/r/jgit/jgit$ cd jgit

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...