Skip to main content

Prerequisites

To create a stack of branches with the Graphite CLI, make sure you’ve:

Create your first branch with the CLI

If you’re familiar with the git workflow, creating a branch and staging/committing changes shouldn’t be new to you. While using a git-style workflow to create branches in Graphite still works, we strongly recommend that you follow the Graphite workflow when creating and editing branches:
  1. Add your changes directly on top of an existing branch. **DON’T **create an empty branch before doing so (we’ll explain further down).
  2. Stage these changes using gt add -a to stage all of your files, or gt add <FILENAME> to stage individual files
  3. Create a new branch with these changes using gt create ...
This follows the traditional stacked changes workflow, treating each branch as an atomic changeset that contains (at least to start with) a single commit. Graphite generally treats branches as if they were commits. This means that something you would break up into multiple commits in a typical git workflow, you would instead break up into multiple branches in Graphite (typically with one commit on each branch).

Different ways to create a branch

Here are a few ways to create a branch containing a single commit using gt create:
Terminal

Configure a branch prefix

When using gt create, you can decide whether to pass in a branch name. A branch name is auto-generated from your commit message if a branch name isn’t provided. You can configure a prefix for gt create to add to all of your auto-generated branch names. See Configure the CLI for more details.

Stack more branches on top

Once you’ve created a branch with your first set of changes, you can continue to build your stack by issuing more gt create commands as you work.
Terminal

Create a stack from an existing branch

If you have a large branch that you want to split up into a stack of smaller branches, you can use the gt split command. Learn more about splitting a branch.