Transcript

Syncing is a special circumstance of merging that ensures the branch you're working on is as up to date as possible with Main and/or Live.

Let's say you and a collaborator are both working on separate updates to your app in your own custom branches. If your collaborator's work is merged up to Main or even deployed to Live before your work is ready, then your custom branch is now missing those changes. It's now considered out of sync with both Main and Live, and will be so until a sync is performed (as in this example, in which we've synced our custom branch here with Live).

There's a few ways to sync your custom branches with Main or Live. Both options are available in the dropdown in the top right of the Version Control side-panel. There's also a shortcut button at the top of the Overview tab in the side-panel called "Sync with Main", and in the event that your branch is out of sync with Live, Bubble will even show a special alert so you can make sure your branches are as up to date as possible.

In this example, I've been working on a new "Contact" page for our app and should soon be ready to merge it into Main for deployment. However, while I've been working on this, my collaborators have been busy deploying their own updates to Live. Up in the top right corner of the Editor, I can see that my branch is out of sync with Live, so before I merge my changes up the tree, I want to first make sure that my branch reflects what currently exists in Live. I'll hit "Sync" and a typical merge process will initiate, only in this instance, the changes are coming from Live as my source branch.

Once I've sorted through any changes or conflicts that arise, and I've completed the merge, the only thing that's different between my branch and the current Live version of the app is the new "Contact" page I've been developing; everything else should be consistent.

In the event you make a change directly to your Live branch through a hotfix branch, the best practice is to sync Main with Live at your earliest convenience. (To learn more, check out our Version Control tutorial on the hotfix branch!)

Wherever you are in your hierarchy, it's generally a good practice to keep your branches in sync as much as possible so that your branches are up to date with any changes happening further up your branch tree.