Managing your local branches

Suppose you are just having your local Git repository, and you have no intentions at the moment to share the code with others; however, you can easily share this knowledge 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, 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 I was on at the time of the creation. You can see the HEAD with git log -1:

   $ git log -1 newBugFix ...