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Git projects and persistence ​

The StackBlitz editor has some differences with respect to persistence (whether and how we store your changes) between projects and Git repositories.

Default mode ​

In its default mode, the StackBlitz editor does not store your changes when you open a Git repository (for instance, https://stackblitz.com/~/github.com/vitejs/vite). You can edit files, create new commits and push them to a remote. However, any intermediate changes that are not pushed will be lost after reloading the page. The editor shows a prominent warning to remind you when persistence is off.

This is in constrast with projects, which always keep your changes stored in the StackBlitz backend. The rough rationale for this difference in behavior is that, for Git-based projects, the ultimate goal is to push some new changes into a remote that already exists. This remote ultimately acts as your storage.

Persistence in Git repositories ​

As a convenience, the StackBlitz editor does persist your changes in some scenarios, even when working on Git repositories. The "rules" are:

  • You should be logged in, and
  • You should have push permissions for the repository, and
  • You should not be working on the default branch.

These conditions should enable you to leverage persistence in the commmon use case of working on a feature branch, either in a repository of yours or a fork of a project that you want to contribute to.

The last condition is not as strict as the others: when you are in the default branch, you can opt-in into persisting your changes.

We might relax these conditions on the future and enable persistence in more scenarios.

Branching model ​

For Git-based projects, the StackBlitz editor establishes a one-to-one relation between your URL and the branch that you are working on. You can create new branches, push them to a remote, etc. But working on a different branch, that is, in Git parlance, checking out a different branch requires you to navigate to its corresponding URL, in your current tab or a new one.

For instance, if you open the repository for these docs, you would go to

https://stackblitz.com/~/github.com/stackblitz/docs.

If you change branches through the branch picker or the editor command Checkout to..., you will be prompted to navigate away to the corresponding URL, for instance

https://stackblitz.com/~/github.com/stackblitz/docs/tree/foobar

for a branch named foobar.

Merging conflicts ​

If you work on a certain branch and persistence is enabled (as described above), the StackBlitz editor stores your intermediate changes not yet pushed to a remote. If you open the same branch at a later point, new commits from the remote could conflict with your stored changes. When this happens, the editor presents several ways to deal with this situation:

  • Discard your old changes and start working fresh again from the latest commit.
  • Push your ongoing changes to an intermediate branch and create a pull request.

We are looking into enabling more sophisticated conflict resolution strategies.