将默认分支更改为从master检出到开发

Question

On a new repository I very often find myself having made changes to the master branch, where of course I should have started with the develop branch.
Of course I should create a feature branch before I start making changes, in which case I'd notice that I'm on master, not develop.
However is there also a setting in git to change the default clone/checkout branch to develop?

Answer 1

Yes, there is a way to do it.

When you run git clone <url> you have your Git call up some other Git. That other Git has a repository; your Git makes a new copy of their repository.

If you supply a -b branch argument to your git clone , your Git ends the cloning process with git checkout branch . So that's the easiest way to do it, but of course if you forgot to run git checkout , you might forget the -b argument too.

If you don't supply -b branch , your Git gets a suggested best branch from the other Git. Your Git then uses that for its final git checkout step. So if you have access to the other Git repository, you just have to go there and change which branch it will suggest.

The branch the other Git will suggest is determined by which branch is checked-out / current in that repository. Since most server repositories are "bare" (have no work-tree), you can't actually check out a branch there, but they still have a current branch. You can update it with git symbolic-ref :

server$ cd repo
server$ git symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/develop

If you can't log in to the server, the server may or may not provide some way to do the equivalent.

Answer 2

The default branch git checks out is determined by the remote repo's HEAD , which is almost always pointed at master . I'm not aware of a local setting that would change clone 's default. (You can approximate that behavior with caveats; see below.) Because git can't generally assume a branch of any given name (including master ) would exist in an arbitrary remote, I wouldn't expect it to have such a feature; it relies on the remote to tell it what the default branch is (again, via the remote's HEAD ).

Checking out master by default is not the most convenient thing for developers in a lot of branching models, but it is a pretty deeply ingrained convention; so my recommendation is to adapt your workflow habits to that, instead of trying to do the opposite.

But what are some options?

For a given clone command, you can use the --branch option to select what is iitially checked out

git clone --branch develop http://some.server/repo.git

Building on that, you could define an alias to clone with the --branch option. (But the alias will fail if used on a repo that doesn't have a branch with your chosen name.)

For repos you control, you could change the HEAD to point to the branch of your choice, but I really recommend you don't for several reasons. First, it may cause confusion if the repo is shared. (Similarly it could complicate the setup of build tools, though that really isn't hard to deal with.) But the biggest reason I wouldn't is, then you're building habits when using your own repos, and those habits will not translate to using others' repos.