How to know which is the default branch

[dsharma522]

How one can one which is the default branch? main/master?

One can know about this by iterating all heads and then manually check , but that is also have one issue.
What if a repository has both the branches as their branch, which means master, main are some branch and default branch could be one of these or something else.

How to get the default branch ?

[Byron]

The default branch is only relevant once, when initializing the repository and git has to decide how to name the only branch in the repository. From there the only questions that can be answered are…

• which branch is currently checked out
• which remote is associated with a branch

[dsharma522]

Is there any way to know the default_branch of repository?

[Byron]

There is a way to ask for configuration values, search for 'config' here. From there it's, it's using the right configuration key to get or set the value.

[dsharma522]

I did repo.config_reader() with all possible config levels (system, global,repository) , it outputs ['DEFAULT'] for every case. Tested with many repositories

[Byron]

Keep debugging and I am sure it will be possible to read config values from it. If that's not the case and reproducible please file an issue.

[dsharma522]

Can we rely upon

repo = git.Repo('repo')
name = repo.heads[0]
print(name)

Will it give the main branch of the repo (main/master or any branch which is main of the repo)

[richtier]

this seems to work repo.remotes.origin.refs.HEAD.ref.remote_head

bit verbose tho!

[agowa]

This doesn't work when refs/remotes/origin/HEAD has not yet been created.
With the git binary the correct command would be git remote set-head origin -a. Does anyone know what the GitPython equivalent to this is?