Now that more git repositories are changing the default branch name to something other than master, I’ve found I struggle to remember what the default branch name is for different projects.

I have added two git aliases which solve this issue for me and I thought I’d share them here in case they are useful to someone else:

• The first one is called default-branch and it will print out the name of the default branch for a git repository
• The second is called checkout-default and it will do a git checkout to the default branch for a git repository

You can install these aliases by running the below commands:

git config --global alias.default-branch '!git remote show origin | awk "/HEAD branch/ {print \$NF}"'
git config --global alias.checkout-default '!git checkout $(git default-branch)'

Now when you want to be on the default branch, instead of having to remember, or find out the default branch manually, you can instead do git checkout-default.