What is the GitLab Flow

• A simplified branching strategy
• All features and fixes first go to master
• Allows for 'production' or 'stable' branches
• Bug fixes/hot fix patches are cherry-picked from master

Feature branches

• Create a feature/bugfix branch to do all work
• Use merge requests to merge to master

Production branch

• One, long-running production release branch as opposed to individual stable branches
• Consider creating a tag for each version that gets deployed

Release branch

• Useful if you release software to customers
• When preparing a new release, create stable branch from master
• Consider creating a tag for each version
• Cherry-pick critical bug fixes to stable branch for patch release
• Never commit bug fixes directly to stable branch

More details

For more information, read through the GitLab Flow documentation.