Changing default git branch to main locally

#github #git #productivity

GitHub has shifted to main branch for new projects but when creating a new project locally with git init still creates master branch. In this post, we will see how to create main branch locally by default.

The git init command accepts value for name of the branch in the -b flag.

$ git init -b main
Initialized empty Git repository in /private/tmp/food/.git/
$ touch tmp.txt
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "main"
[main (root-commit) 0b3550b] main
 1 file changed, 0 insertions(+), 0 deletions(-)
 create mode 100644 tmp.txt

This is possible only with Git 2.24 onwards.

We can also configure the default branch globally.

git config --global init.defaultBranch main

For older Git versions, we can switch to the main branch before committing anything because the branch doesn't exist for real until something is committed.

cd sport
git init
git branch -m main

My git version was 2.31.1 while writing this post.

git --version
git version 2.31.1

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