change-default-init-branch-name.md

Change Default Init Branch Name

Category: Git

Git uses master as the default branch name when initialising a project.

Starting in Git 2.28, git init will instead look to the value of init.defaultBranch when creating the first branch in a new repository. If that value is unset, init.defaultBranch defaults to master.

To change the default branch to something else (for example main) use the following command:

git config --global init.defaultBranch main

After setting this variable, running git init will produce a repository whose initial branch is main.

git init
Initialised empty Git repository in /path/to/my-application/.git/

git status
On branch main

No commits yet

nothing to commit (create/copy files and use "git add" to track)

See Git - Introducing init.defaultBranch for more details.