In this case, we call the issue "First release" as shown by the following picture:

Then, we create a merge request associated with the issue. We instruct GitLab to automatically create a branch associated with this issue as well. The branch will be called <code>1-first-release</code> and its source branch is <code>main</code>. This means then when the merge request is accepted, the new code in the branch <code>1-first-release</code> will be merged into the branch <code>main</code>.

Please note that the merge options are so that the branch will be deleted when the merge request is accepted. This usually makes sense because we don't need to keep the branch we the job is done. If you are asking, don't worry: although the branch will be deleted, commits will not be lost. Therefore, the history of changes will be preserved.

On GitLab side everything is in place, so we can work on our local host to write our code. For the sake of simplicity, we will just edit one file, README.md.

We can now move back to GitLab-side and close the merge request.