Question

Your team ships a customer-facing web service and deploys to production multiple times per day. Developers integrate small changes directly into a single main branch behind feature flags, and every commit to main triggers CI and automated deployment. Recently, a critical production bug requires a fix that must ship immediately while a large in-progress feature (already merged behind a disabled flag) must NOT be released. Which approach best preserves your current branching strategy while safely shipping the fix?

Accepted Answer

Commit the hotfix directly to main and rely on the disabled feature flag to keep the unfinished feature hidden, then let the normal pipeline deploy.

Answer

Create a long-lived release branch from an earlier commit, cherry-pick the fix there, and permanently deploy from that branch going forward.

Answer

Revert every commit related to the in-progress feature on main, ship the hotfix, then re-apply the feature commits afterward.

Answer

Freeze all merges to main, switch the team to a feature-branch model, and only deploy once the large feature is complete.