The default git/GitHub branch name is oppressive terminology (more info). It is easy to change the branch name for a single repository or for new repositories. This script makes it easy to rename your default branch on GitHub repositories in bulk.

Usage

Installation

To install, run

python -m pip install rename-github-default-branch

Then, create a GitHub.com personal access token with the repo permission scope and set the environment variable:

export RENAME_GITHUB_TOKEN=YOUR_PERSONAL_ACCESS_TOKEN

Renaming branches on GitHub

Then to rename the default branch to main for a specific repository (you must have write access):

rename-github-default-branch -r dfm/rename-github-default-branch -t main

Or for all the repos that you own (excluding forks):

rename-github-default-branch -t main

You can also provide regular expressions to match against the repository name. For example:

rename-github-default-branch -t main -p "dfm/*" -p "exoplanet-dev/*"

Updating local branches

To update your local repository, you can run the following:

git fetch origin main
git checkout -b main origin/main
git branch -D master

where main is the name of the new default branch and origin is the name of the git remote.