Adding a Staging branch to your Git Flow setup

We have a CI/CD setup and we need a staging environment now (based off of a branch we're going to call staging). Git flow by default only has develop and master. What we're going to do to is create a staging branch and make it the default for production releases (aka what master used to be).

This branch will then get deployed (automatically) to the Staging environment. Once we're happy with everything, we'll manually merge the branch in master and it will then be deployed live (manually).

Create a staging branch based on master

git checkout master
git branch staging

# push the new staging branch to remote as well so other people can see it
git push -u origin staging

Now run

git flow init -f

The -f will let you force the reconfiguration of branches even if they are already set

Alternative is to manually update your .git/config file to change the master branch for gitflow

[gitflow "branch"]
    master = staging
    develop = develop

You can confirm your settings with git flow config

Branch name for production releases: staging
Branch name for "next release" development: develop
Feature branch prefix: feature/
Bugfix branch prefix: bugfix/
Release branch prefix: release/
Hotfix branch prefix: hotfix/
Support branch prefix: support/
Version tag prefix: