No Git Masters

Published: Aug 25th, 2020

This is part of Joyful Rails, a list of recommendations to make developing your Rails app more productive and joyful.

In this article, we are talking about Git default branch names.

Why

In Git, the default branch name is master. This term should be avoided because of its connection to slavery. It also does not clearly or accurately describe the default branch.

How

Create a new branch with the new name, “develop”.

git checkout -b develop

Push the develop branch up to your remote git repository.

git push origin develop

Delete the master branch.

git branch --delete --force master

Make the develop branch the default branch. On GitHub you can do that under Settings -> Branches.

Delete the master branch on your remote repository.

git push origin --delete master

Alternatives

In the example, we used the name develop. Other good options are main and development.