In hindsight, this really should have been post number 100 in the blog, or perhaps it should have happened even earlier. In any event it’s high-time I made this move and captured the process. In June 2020 the good folks at GitHub announced that they would begin removing references to master as a small step forward in removing divisive language in tech. The change dictates that the default branch name of future repositories should be main in place of master.

Today, I am dictating that the same should be true for ALL of my repositories, old and new alike. Besides, I find it very confusing to have some defaults using one name while others do not. To begin this transformation of old to new, I elected to start here with this blog.

Moving master to main

In support of this effort I went looking for sound guidance and found 5 steps to change GitHub default branch from master to main. In case that post ever disappears, here are the key elements:

All commands

# Step 1 
# create main branch locally, taking the history from master
git branch -m master main

# Step 2 
# push the new local main branch to the remote repo (GitHub) 
git push -u origin main

# Step 3
# switch the current HEAD to the main branch
git symbolic-ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD refs/remotes/origin/main

# Step 4
# change the default branch on GitHub to main
# https://docs.github.com/en/github/administering-a-repository/setting-the-default-branch

# Step 5
# delete the master branch on the remote
git push origin --delete master

If main Already Exists

In cases, like this blog, where a main branch already exists, a couple of preemptive steps must be taken. I found some useful and brief TL;DR version guidance, and here again are the key parts:

TL;DR version

// delete branch locally
git branch -d localBranchName

// delete branch remotely
git push origin --delete remoteBranchName

And that’s a wrap. Until next time, I hope this encourages others to take similar action.