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Renaming your master branch to main in Github👩‍💻

Jane Tracy 👩🏽‍💻 on September 06, 2020

How I learned about the main branch When I started to code in March this year, I have always used the master branch as my default branch...

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Kim Hallberg • Sep 6 '20

Git v2.28 introduced the init.defaultBranch config so now you can also set it locally as well. 👍 🙂

$ git config --global init.defaultBranch main

Github wrote a blog post about that you can read - "Introducing init.defaultBranch". 😀

Jane Tracy 👩🏽‍💻 • Sep 7 '20

Thank you, Kim, for adding that.
I didn't know about it. 🔥

Tiago Celestino • Sep 7 '20

It's nice!!!

Dan Jones • Sep 10 '20

I will continue to maintain that main is not a useful name. Neither is master, and has other problematic implications. So, I'm certainly not advocating using master.

The thing is, we name all of our other branches according to their purpose, so why not the default branch? In my opinion, the default branch should also be named according to how it's used.

For projects where the default branch represents the stable code, it should be named something like stable, or prod. I usually use prod for continuously deployed web apps, and stable for versioned projects.

For projects where the default branch represents the main development branch, it should be named develop or development.

Jane Tracy 👩🏽‍💻 • Sep 11 '20

Thanks for your input, Dan. ✔
Yes, it's true.
Different teams or organization name their branches differently. 💯🌟
Develop branch is common especially for features underdevelopment etc.