Understanding pull requests and merging best practices

Tracking branches and changes to your code is only one of the features built into Bitbucket. When you are finished with your code changes, those changes need to be merged back to the branch that is upstream from your current branch. If you are following the Gitflow model, then that means that all of your code changes were done in a dedicated feature branch and now it is time to merge those changes back into the develop branch. The process of doing this merge is called a pull request. A pull request is more than just merging your code changes. The rest of this recipe will explain and walk you through how to use pull requests to maintain high-quality code and minimize the chances that your new code changes will break something.

How to do it…

Once you are done with your changes, it is time to initiate a pull request. This pull request will trigger a chain reaction of events that is covered in the following steps:

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