Trunk-Based Development on a Small Laravel Team

Long-lived feature branches feel safe and bill you later: the two-week branch that takes a day to merge, and the merge nobody wants to re-run. Trunk-based development is the alternative that works well for small teams.

The rules, sized for a small team#

• Everything targets main. Branches live hours to a couple of days, never weeks.
• Main always runs: tests pass, migrations apply, the app boots.
• Review is quick and small, because the changes are small.

Half-done work still merges#

The objection is always “the feature is not finished”. Merge it anyway, behind a flag. In Laravel that is a config entry or a Feature::active() check, not a branch:

if (config('features.new_billing')) {
    // new flow
}

Delete the flag when the feature ships. A flag you forget is cheaper than a branch you rebase for a month.

What it buys#

Conflicts stay small because diffs stay small. Main is deployable any day, so the git-push deploy from a tag or from main stops being an event. And code review gets read, because there is finally little enough of it.

Start with the rule that matters most: nothing lives on a branch longer than two days.