What is Git Flow

Git flow is a branching model proposed by Vincent Driessen, this model aims in standardizing the branching and merging operations for a project. If there is not fixed model then, every project will have its own set of branched which will not be easy for others to understand, hence it is advisable to go for a standard set of branches to make the version control clean and reusable.

Git flow, abstracts the development team from the underlying Git commands, they can work on the repository using the Git-flow commands instead of directly using the underlying Git commands.

Git flow defines the following the following branches for a repository.

Development
Master

Also it defines the naming conventions which will be used in future when new feature branches are created. The default branch prefixes are

Feature
Release
Hotfix

Any change in the code, addition of features, fixing bugs etc can be handled with these set of branches.

Git Flow is an add-on package to Git, which provides a set of commands to create and manage the branches. Source tree supports Git Flow, it provides as icon in the tool bar to create and manage Git Flow.