Git 2.28 Now Shipping With Feature For Configurable Default/Main Branch Name

Git 2.28 is now officially out this Monday and features continued work on moving off the "master" default branch naming as well as the ongoing work around ultimately transitioning from SHA1 to SHA256 for hashing to prevent possible collisions.

With Git 2.28 the support is now in place for git config init.defaultBranch to set the default branch name for newly-created Git repositories. This is to replace Git's existing hard-coded default of "master" so instead users can opt for alternative default branch names like "default" or "main" and others. This new option does not change existing Git repositories.

Similarly, with Git 2.28 out there, GitHub is working on changing the default branch name. For GitHub they are working to migrate from "master" to using "main" as the default name. The GitHub process is ongoing but later this year should allow the seamless migration for existing repositories.

The GitHub Blog has more details on the other changes with Git 2.28. There is also the release announcement with additional details on the new feature release for this widely used distributed revision control system.