The git world has moved from “master” as the default branch to “main”.

What would it take to change edX and Open edX repos from master to main?

• GitHub instructions for renaming a branch: https://docs.github.com/en/github/administering-a-repository/renaming-a-branch

  • Unfortunately, GitHub won’t auto-forward “master” references to “main”, so everyone with a clone needs to manually rename the branch also.

    • GitHub provides instructions, but they are three command-line commands, which not everyone is comfortable using.

• After renaming the branch and pushing it, update the repo on GitHub (see info here for steps below):

  • Update default branch to be main

  • Update branch protection rules

  • delete master

  • set the remote HEAD

  • find/update references to master in the repo (.yaml and .yml files, .github/workflows, etc)

• edX pipelines: update ‘master’ to ‘main’ where it appears in pipeline yml files (code here)

• jenkins?

• readthedocs: project settings mention “master” as the branch to build.

• openedx.yaml files have “openedx_release: {“ref”: “master”}” in them.

• confluence process pages that mention master

Additional Notes:

• The edx/edx-cookiecutters was updated to default to main in this PR with ADR.