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!
![39 Shirts – Leaving Mozilla]()
In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...
![5 HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed]()
When you say or read "HTML5", you half expect exotic dancers and unicorns to walk into the room to the tune of "I'm Sexy and I Know It." Can you blame us though? We watched the fundamental APIs stagnate for so long that a basic feature...
![Dress Up Your Select Elements with FauxSelect]()
I received an email from Ben Delaney a few weeks back about an interesting MooTools script he had written. His script was called FauxSelect and took a list of elements (UL / LI) and transformed it into a beautiful Mac-like SELECT element.
![Jack Rugile’s Favorite CodePen Demos]()
CodePen is an amazing source of inspiration for code and design. I am blown away every day by the demos users create. As you'll see below, I have an affinity toward things that move. It was difficult to narrow down my favorites, but here they are!
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.