Eric Crowder
Change your local default git branch
2020-06-21
Background
GitHub announced that it will be retiring racist terms from its platform. This includes the use of master
to refer to default branches.
Want to change all of those current projects that you have to use a different default branch? Fortunately, git
makes the process of changing default branches very easy.
How
Let’s say that you want to use main
as your new default branch.
In your project directory, do the following:
git branch -m master main
git push -u origin main
The first command will create a branch called main
and copy master
to it. This means that your git
log is preserved in its entirety. The second command pushes the main
branch to your designated remote
, whether it be GitHub, GitLab, Sourcehut, local git
server, etc.
That is it!