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

Incredible Demos

  • By
    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...

  • By
    Face Detection with jQuery

    I've always been intrigued by recognition software because I cannot imagine the logic that goes into all of the algorithms. Whether it's voice, face, or other types of detection, people look and sound so different, pictures are shot differently, and from different angles, I...

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!