Git Workflow and Best Practices

3 posts · Aug 2011 – Oct 2022

What this trail covers

Shopify has evolved its Git workflows and best practices, with this post detailing the introduction of automatic deployment triggered by the GitHub merge button. This system, powered by Shipit and integrated with ChatOps (Spy), automates the deployment pipeline, resolving issues of deploy logjam and unshipped changes. The goal is to enable faster, safer, and more frequent deployments, reinforcing high expectations, trust, and fearlessness in developers. Future work includes further speed and stability improvements.

All Shopify trails

Oct 2022On the Importance of Pull Request Discipline - ShopifyThis post details the importance of PR discipline by explaining why it's crucial for implementation and maintenance, and what constitutes a well-structured PR (title, summary, commits, comments, reviewers, labels, projects, linked issues). It provides practical guidance on writing effective PR titles, summaries, and commit messages, emphasizing clarity, context, and intentionality.
Nov 2019Successfully Merging the Work of 1000+ Developers - ShopifyThis post details the evolution of Shopify's Merge Queue system from v1 to v2. Merge Queue v2 addresses the problems of Merge Queue v1 by introducing a comment-based interface (replacing a browser extension), ensuring master stays green by running CI on a predictive branch before merging, and improving emergency merge speed. It also introduces a failure-tolerance threshold for flaky tests and optimizes throughput by defining batch sizes for deployments.
Jun 2018Introducing the Merge Queue - ShopifyThis post introduces the concept and implementation of a merge queue within Shopify's Shipit deployment coordination tool. It details how the merge queue is integrated with GitHub pull requests to automate the merging process when the main branch is stable, and how it handles unsafe commits and automatic revert detection. The post also discusses the UI/UX adjustments made to encourage adoption of the merge queue over direct merges to master.
Oct 2016Automatic Deployment at Shopify - ShopifyThis post details the implementation of automatic deployment at Shopify, triggered by the GitHub merge button. It describes the 'Before State' (manual deploys, logjams, unshipped changes) and the 'After State' (automated deploys via Shipit and ChatOps). It walks through the GitHub pull request flow, CI status annotations, Shipit's role in staging deploys, and ChatOps notifications. It also discusses the results after one month (faster shipping, smaller deploy batches, human intervention for rollbacks) and unexpected surprises (minor performance impact during deploys, need for reminders). Next steps include more speed, stability, automatic rollback, and better deploy granularity.
Jun 2015Introducing Shipit - ShopifyThis post introduces Shipit, an open-sourced deployment tool developed internally at Shopify. Shipit addresses challenges in coordinating frequent deployments for large teams by providing features like deployment locks for synchronization during incidents, easy project setup via `shipit.yml` files, an audit trail of deploys and rollbacks, and improved performance by leveraging GitHub webhooks for real-time event handling. It also includes pre-deployment checklists and visualizations for monitoring progress.
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Aug 2011How we use git at Shopify - ShopifyThis post details Shopify's Git workflow, emphasizing forking repositories, using feature branches, and setting up remotes ('origin', 'mainline') and branches ('production', 'staging', 'master'). It outlines a day-to-day usage pattern involving checking out master, creating feature branches, rebasing to keep branches up-to-date with mainline, pushing to staging for testing, squashing commits before merging into master, and finally pushing to production. It also provides additional git tips like unstaging commits, resetting history, interactive rebasing, amending commits, reverting commits, and using git bisect.