Git flow - create feature branch off another feature branch

Solution 1:

You can create a sub-feature branch via

git flow feature start PROJ-511 feature/PROJ-500

But you cannot use the GitFlow tool to merge the branch back into the main feature branch because if you do

git flow feature finish PROJ-511

the feature will be merged into develop. Ergo sub-features are not supported, you need to do it manually.

Alternatives: The requirement is not new, though. There is an open issue as well as a fork project claiming to support finishing features into branches other than develop. I also found a pull request with an implementation of that feature. You might want to try that modification and see if you are happy with it.

Update 2019-12-13: As user Matěj Kříž just mentioned in his comment, user Tony Chemit has written an answer here a few months after mine, pointing to gitflow-avh as an alternative to the original gitflow product. It supports sub-features out of the box with the syntax shown above. Some years have passed by and nowadays the AVH edition is part of the normal installation of Git for Windows, I just verified this on my local box and tested the sub-feature option. I.e. for Windows users it just works right after Git installation.

Solution 2:

As I understood, gitflow is quite abandoned.

gitflow-avh replaces it and offers this feature (see https://github.com/petervanderdoes/gitflow#creating-featurereleasehotfixsupport-branches).

I just try it and it works well to me.

git flow feature start PROJ-511 feature/PROJ-500
git flow feature finish PROJ-511

PROJ-511 was merged into feature/PROJ-500.

Solution 3:

As already mentioned, we can start a new feature using any base branch with

git flow feature start PROJ-511 feature/PROJ-500

And to finish the sub feature we can temporarly change git flow configuration to use our feature branch instead of develop:

git flow config set develop feature/PROJ-500 && git flow feature finish PROJ-511

This way, git flow runs all commands and sanity checks. Finally, To restore config, we can run

git flow config set develop develop 

Solution 4:

Update (November 5, 2020): As noted in the newer answer here, this is possible with gitflow-avh which has replaced the original git flow.

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Original Answer:

I don't think there is a method for this in git flow, but it is fairly simple with just git.

git checkout PROJ-500
git checkout -b PROJ-511
...do your PROJ-511 work...
git checkout PROJ-500
git merge PROJ-511
git branch -d PROJ-511