gitflow

gitflow is a developer-side automation toolkit for the GitFlow branching and release strategy. It provides two interactive shell scripts — release.sh and hotfix.sh — that handle releases, hot fixes, branch creation, version bumping, and pull request creation from a developer's machine.

Add it as a git submodule to any Maven project and you can run a full release or hotfix with a single make command.

What is GitFlow?

GitFlow is a branching model built around two long-lived branches:

Branch	Purpose
master	Always mirrors the production state
develop	Integrates the latest features for the next release

Supporting branches are created for specific tasks:

Branch type	Pattern	Branches from
Feature	feature/*	develop
Release	release/x.y.z	develop
Hotfix	hotfix/x.y.z	latest tag on master

GitFlow Workflow

Architecture

Consumer projects wire in both repos:

• gitflow - add this repository as a git submodule in the root folder of the consumer project. To initiate the process, developers execute make release or make hotfix locally, which creates the corresponding branch and opens a PR all in one step.
• github-workflows — reusable GitHub Actions workflows referenced from GitHub Actions scripts in the consumer project's own .github/workflows folder. Once the PR lands on master, GitHub Actions publishes artifacts, tags the release, and opens a back-merge PR into develop automatically.