How to Detect the Default Branch in a git Repository

By  on  

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!

Recent Features

  • By
    5 Ways that CSS and JavaScript Interact That You May Not Know About

    CSS and JavaScript:  the lines seemingly get blurred by each browser release.  They have always done a very different job but in the end they are both front-end technologies so they need do need to work closely.  We have our .js files and our .css, but...

  • By
    I’m an Impostor

    This is the hardest thing I've ever had to write, much less admit to myself.  I've written resignation letters from jobs I've loved, I've ended relationships, I've failed at a host of tasks, and let myself down in my life.  All of those feelings were very...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    jQuery topLink Plugin

    Last week I released a snippet of code for MooTools that allowed you to fade in and out a "to the top" link on any page. Here's how to implement that functionality using jQuery. The XHTML A simple link. The CSS A little CSS for position and style. The jQuery...

  • By
    Image Reflections with CSS

    Image reflection is a great way to subtly spice up an image.  The first method of creating these reflections was baking them right into the images themselves.  Within the past few years, we've introduced JavaScript strategies and CANVAS alternatives to achieve image reflections without...

Discussion

  1. Djangounet

    Cool trick ! Except… it works only if your LANG is “en”…

    My attempt :

    git remote show origin | grep 'HEAD' | cut -d':' -f2 | sed -e 's/^ *//g' -e 's/ *$//g'
    

    Best regards

  2. WA

    This one should be language-neutral:

    git ls-remote --symref https://github.com/cli/cli HEAD | awk -F'[/\t]' 'NR == 1 {print $3}'
    
    
  3. sp

    Hi,
    How to find default branch for all the repositories in an organization ?

  4. Alex Z

    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.

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!