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!
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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.