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Prerequisites

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

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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).

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Different ways to create a branch

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

Terminal
# navigate to the trunk branch of your repository
gt trunk


# * build part 1 of your feature *


# the following two commands create a new branch off of main with your changes and add a commit


# add all unstaged changes (same syntax as git add)
gt add -A
# create a commit on a new branch with its name inferred from your commit message
gt create
# OR specify your commit message via an option, just like git
gt create -m "part 1"
# OR you can also specify a branch name yourself
gt create making_part_1
# This works too!
gt create -m "part 1" making_part_1




# If you don't run `add`, you'll be prompted to add your changes interactively.
# You can also run `add` as part of the create command with the `-a` flag
gt create -am "part 1"


# You can make the previous command even shorter by using an alias (most common gt commands have an alias, and you can even configure your own!)
gt c -am "part 1"

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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.

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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
# * build part 2 of your feature *


# create a new branch on your stack
gt create -am "part 2"


# * build part 3 of your feature *


# create another new branch on your stack
gt create -am "part 3"

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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.