← Back to all TILs

Set Default Branch Name For New Repos

git Written June 12, 2023

When you run git init in a directory, it will initialize that directory as a git repository. The default branch name for any new git repository is master. A better name for the base branch would be something like main.

To set main as the new default for all new repos, you can run the following git command.

$ git config --global init.defaultBranch main

This will update your .gitconfig file to contain the following lines.

[init]
    defaultBranch = main

Try running git init in a fresh directory and then git branch --show-current to see that the base branch is now defaulting to main.

Other posts like this