Better Practices for Git Version Control in Postman

Manage collaboration within your team and community so that you don’t release breaking changes

However, consider that you want to manage your updates more carefully because you’re worried about making changes that upset someone else’s workflow. That’s where more robust version control comes in handy. Everyone can work asynchronously using separate forks so that you explicitly merge changes.

Postman supports Git workflows to let you manage collaboration within your team as well as collaboration with your broader communities so that you don’t release breaking changes. This means that you can make atomic, all or nothing, changes preserved in a changelog. These indivisible units of change are made as an explicit save, or commit, to make it easier to manage collaboration at scale. You can track down where things went wrong, reverse mistakes, and feel confident about rolling out changes to consumers.

To continue our example of making changes to an API, here is a basic overview of how Git works in Postman:

If your team does not use API specifications, then you can skip that step. In that case, the collection then becomes your single source of truth. While you can still export and import collections as a standalone file, the recommendation is to fork the collection. When you fork a collection, you establish a link to the parent branch. This allows you to pull updates from the parent branch in case of any updates. You can also submit pull requests to propose updates to the parent branch.

If you don’t have an editor role for the collection or you want to make atomic changes, here is how you control your updates:

Some organizations only want to expose their public API when ready for public consumption. In this case, here is how you can control your updates:

Although they sound very similar, “version control” is not the same as “versioning.” Version control is what we’ve talked about earlier regarding forking, merging, and pull requests. Teams create workflows around version control so that they don’t release breaking changes in a collaborative environment.

Different teams follow their own recipes for version control, so always check with your team lead on the preferred way that your team works. Your team might choose to use any combination of these better practices depending on your specific goals and constraints. If your team has a unique workflow, share some of your tips or questions in the comments below.

For more details about version control and versioning, here are some helpful docs:

Technical review by Arlemi Turpault and Preetham Mavin.

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