What is Trunk-Based Development?
A branching strategy where all developers commit frequently to a single main branch.
Trunk-Based Development (TBD) is a source control branching model where developers commit small, frequent changes directly to the main branch (trunk) rather than working in long-lived feature branches. Short-lived feature branches (1-2 days max) merged via PR are acceptable. TBD enables true CI/CD — every commit is potentially releasable. Feature flags gate incomplete features. Google, Facebook, and Microsoft all use trunk-based development at scale.
Related Terms
More CI/CD Terms
Blue-Green Deployment
A release strategy using two identical environments to achieve zero-downtime deploys.
Canary Deployment
Gradually rolling out a new version to a small percentage of users before full release.
CI/CD
Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery — automating build, test, and deploy pipelines.
Feature Flag
A configuration mechanism to enable or disable features without redeploying code.
Flagger
A Kubernetes operator automating canary deployments, A/B tests, and blue-green releases.
GitHub Actions
GitHub's built-in CI/CD platform for automating workflows triggered by repository events.
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