Don’t Lose your HEAD over Default Branches
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Read on for a little trick to always get the default branch…
While git has no “default” branch, online code platforms such as GitHub need to define a default for the branch that someone sees when they look at code online. While the community standard for the default branch is now becoming main instead of master1, and while the switch for any repo is rather easy and is well supported by usethis, for a while (forever) there will still be repos with different default branches in the wild.2 Especially as nothing prevents you from using any other name for the default branch (although this could trip up collaborators).3
So, what to deal with the existence of different possible default branches?
- usethis tooling regarding default branches including
usethis::git_default_branch(), is very handy. - You can also use gert directly, e.g.
gert::git_remote_ls()will help show you remote references. The symref for ref contains the default branch name.
gert::git_remote_ls() |>
head() # another useful thing named head
#> ref symref
#> 1 HEAD refs/heads/main
#> 2 refs/heads/1password <NA>
#> 3 refs/heads/2fa <NA>
#> 4 refs/heads/email <NA>
#> 5 refs/heads/fix_author_links <NA>
#> 6 refs/heads/footnotes <NA>
#> oid
#> 1 2ef29132be682883d1c12a957c38e1fa6599898f
#> 2 e4f3ef36c453dd2ede5a091c7d3f5f32c609caca
#> 3 7461f15e81651d5bbf6dcab078801cfa35e2f039
#> 4 6f8c849ef325dc597e819bffbd8829afa05ae414
#> 5 2f328db8fc6ce94caa50ddde7a0b021178818d8f
#> 6 f552c2dcac79228e929e65975c52484f5655577c
gert::git_remote_info() shows the head for a given remote:
gert::git_remote_info("origin")
#> $name
#> [1] "origin"
#>
#> $url
#> [1] "[email protected]:ropensci/roweb3.git"
#>
#> $push_url
#> NULL
#>
#> $head
#> [1] "refs/remotes/origin/main"
#>
#> $fetch
#> [1] "+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*"
#>
#> $push
#> character(0)
- When linking to a file, or trying to download the same path from a gaggle of repositories, think of the HEAD reference! I.e. instead of linking to a file via
https://github.com/<owner>/<repo>/tree/<default-branch>/<path>where you need to know what the default branch is, you can link tohttps://github.com/<owner>/<repo>/tree/HEAD/<path>that will always point to the latest version of the path in the default branch. Similarly, for raw content (to download), you can use links à lahttps://github.com/<owner>/<repo>/raw/HEAD/<path>.
In conclusion, master or main? Hit the nail on the HEAD. 😉
-
For more context on Terminology, Power and Oppressive Language see for instance https://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-knodel-terminology-00.html ↩︎
-
Actually, this post was the occasion to change the default branch for the source of this website! ↩︎
-
Some repos only have a branch called
gh-pages(e.g. everything under https://github.com/ropensci-docs), in which case that is the default branch. ↩︎
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