Using Git in Designer - Maia Documentation

You use Git actions in Designer to save your work, share it with your team, and bring in changes that other people have made. Designer has Git built in for version control, so you can collaborate on your data pipelines without overwriting each other’s work. This page describes the Git actions that are available in Designer, and walks through a typical Git workflow. For an introduction to Git and how to set it up for your project, read Git overview.

Git actions

You can find the available Git actions by clicking the name of your branch on the project bar. This opens a drop-down menu containing all available Git actions.

Commit changes to your pipelines, creating a new snapshot of the code. A commit is a “local” action and should be followed by a push action when you are ready to collaborate.
Push local changes in your commits to the remote repository when you’re ready to collaborate, allowing other team members to access (pull) the changes into their own copy of the remote.
Pull remote changes from remote to your copy of the branch, updating your working directory version of the code.
Merge from branch to integrate changes from another branch—either its remote or local copy—into your local branch. To see someone else’s merged changes, you will need to pull from remote. Use this action to resolve merge conflicts between your branch and the branch you are merging from.
Compare changes to compare the local changes you have made in a file to the version of that file from the last commit.
Revert changes to revert the state of your branch to a previous commit.
Reset branch to reset your local branch to either of the following states:
- Reset to the latest local commit, discarding any uncommitted changes in your local branch.
- Reset to the latest remote commit, discarding any local commits and any uncommitted changes in your local branch, and then pulling the latest commits from the remote branch.
View pull requests to see the pull requests you have created in your Git repository.
View commit history to view all the commits you have made in your current branch.

Expand this box to watch our video about Git Basics.

Video: Git Basics in Maia

It’s important to note the difference between how Git works in Designer and standard Git. When you work in Designer, you don’t have a copy of the files in your local machine. Instead, you’ll have an online copy of the remote repository. This is essentially your working directory, which you can access when you’re logged into Maia with this specific account. However, the online copy in Designer is not automatically synced to the remote repository; therefore, changes that are staged and committed are isolated from the remote repository until you push. In the same way, new changes that are pushed to the remote repository by others are isolated from your online copy in Designer, until you pull remote changes.

Typical Git workflow

A typical day-to-day workflow in Designer looks like this:

Create a branch to work on, or check out an existing branch. To learn more, read Branches.
Build or edit your pipelines.
Compare changes to review what you’ve changed.
Commit changes to save a snapshot to your branch.
Push local changes to send your commits to the remote repository, so your team can see them.
Pull remote changes to bring in work that other people have pushed. If you need to combine work from another branch, use Merge from branch, which also helps you resolve any merge conflicts.
If you use an external Git provider and your team has a pull request approval workflow, create a pull request after you push.