Create private branch on remote repository in git

Question

I would like to build specific flow on our company git.

1. developer create a branch on his local machine and commit there some files.
2. dev push this branch to remote repo
3. Other devs cannot access to this branch
4. after few rounds off pushing dev decide to publish his changes.
5. merge his private branch into public branch
6. push that public branch.

In the other words - is it possible to configure private remote branch in public repository?

Answer 1

The flow that is used in my team is to have complete separate repositories for each team member in addition to origin on the main git server.

1. Dev creates local branch on local machine and commits away
2. At the end of the day (or whenever is suitable) dev pushes to his private repo git push jdoe-private my-cool-branch
3. Dev decides he is happy for the work to be published and possibly merged so can tidy it up and rebase it with impunity
4. Dev pushes his branch to origin git push origin my-cool-branch

The rationale for this setup for us is to allow devs to freely rebase and avoid the problems that can arise from upstream rebasing and also to have full backups. The separate repositories are only private by convention but would be easy to add access control if required. There is a lot of duplication of data but unless your repo is really huge, this is probably not a concern.

Answer 2

The common solution I know is to agree on "branch namespaces", by prepending some string to branch names. For example, branches that start with "private/" are for private experiments. You'd then get branches like

• private/JohnDoe/refactoring-taxcalculation
• private/JohnDoe/newGUILayout
• private/JaneJones/Java8
• private/TKirk/build-spaceship

That keeps the branches separate, and makes it clear what their purpose is. However, that way the branches are still public, because anyone can see and pull them.

If you want to restrict access to these branches based on user, you'd need to have some kind of branch-based access control. There is no such thing in core git, but some git hosting servers allow this (Atlassian Stash for example). I don't know of any server that allows these kind of private branches, but maybe there is one that allows it or lets you script a solution.

Note, however, that what you are asking for is rather unusual. The common solution is the one I outlined above.