git-trunk-20200914.md

canonical_url	date	description
https://grencez.dev/2020/git-trunk-20200914	2020-09-14	How to switch the default branch of a git repository from master to trunk.

Creating a Git repository whose default branch is named "trunk"

Date: 2020-09-14

GitHub will soon start preferring that default branches are named main instead of master. I'd like to have my new project's default branch named trunk. It might make sense to rename the branch for other projects too.

Initializing

I tried initializing a repository with git init --initial-branch trunk, but my version of Git doesn't support that flag yet. It looks like running git branch -M trunk after the initial commit is (roughly?) equivalent. Here's approximately how I made the initial commit for https://github.com/fantasma/fantasma:

mkdir fantasma
cd fantasma
git init
echo "# Fantasma" > README.md
git add README.md
git commit -m "Add README"
git branch -M trunk
git remote add origin git@github.com:fantasma/fantasma.git
git push -u origin trunk

Renaming

It's pretty easy to rename master to trunk as well if you don't have pull requests referencing it. I did this for https://github.com/grencez/protocon:

cd protocon
# Create and checkout a new trunk branch.
git checkout -b trunk
# Push it upstream.
git push git@github.com:grencez/protocon.git trunk
# Delete local master branch.
git branch -d master

Then I changed the default branch to "trunk" on GitHub and deleted "master".