How to Detect the Default Branch in a git Repository
Over the past few years, many engineering teams have switched their default git branch name from master to a different, potentially less offensive term. I'm all for choosing to name your default branch whatever you'd like, but not having a universal default branch name can complicate some automation.
So how can we detect the default branch name for a git repository? I use a few chained commands:
git remote show REMOTE_REPO_NAME | grep 'HEAD branch' | cut -d' ' -f5
Swap out REMOTE_REPO_NAME with the name of the remote/ upstream repository and you'll get the remote repository's default branch name!
![Chris Coyier’s Favorite CodePen Demos]()
David asked me if I'd be up for a guest post picking out some of my favorite Pens from CodePen. A daunting task! There are so many! I managed to pick a few though that have blown me away over the past few months. If you...
![Write Simple, Elegant and Maintainable Media Queries with Sass]()
I spent a few months experimenting with different approaches for writing simple, elegant and maintainable media queries with Sass. Each solution had something that I really liked, but I couldn't find one that covered everything I needed to do, so I ventured into creating my...
![Duplicate the jQuery Homepage Tooltips]()
The jQuery homepage has a pretty suave tooltip-like effect as seen below:
The amount of jQuery required to duplicate this effect is next to nothing; in fact, there's more CSS than there is jQuery code! Let's explore how we can duplicate jQuery's tooltip effect.
The HTML
The overall...
![GitHub-Style Sliding Links]()
GitHub seems to change a lot but not really change at all, if that makes any sense; the updates come often but are always fairly small. I spotted one of the most recent updates on the pull request page. Links to long branch...
Cool trick ! Except… it works only if your LANG is “en”…
My attempt :
Best regards
This one should be language-neutral:
git ls-remote --symref https://github.com/cli/cli HEAD | awk -F'[/\t]' 'NR == 1 {print $3}'Hi,
How to find default branch for all the repositories in an organization ?
Hi, thanks for it!
I digged a bit further on git remote and I noticed in its man page the subcommand git remote set-head. Its description begins with “Sets or deletes the default branch (i.e. the target of the symbolic-ref refs/remotes//HEAD)”.
So, it turns out that we can actually do this:
$ sed -e ‘s/^.*\///’ < .git/refs/remotes/origin/HEAD
devel
It is way faster than actually querying the remote server.