Set the default branch on your Azure DevOps Repos

James Dumont le Douarec

Published in

FAUN — Developer Community 🐾

3 min readDec 25, 2020

Introduction

« Breaking News » the Git project has decided to use as default branch main instead of master.

As very well described in the following article, Microsoft has set on november 2020 the default branch of all new Azure DevOps Repos to be main instead of master.

“Microsoft is joining the Git project (statement, code change) and multiple vendors including GitHub in delivering these changes. As an industry, we’re making an effort to move towards more inclusive language.”

New Git Repos

New Repos will inherit from a policy that set the default branch name for new Repos.

This policy is set at the different levels:

The Organization level under “Organization Settings” -> “Repositories”
or at the Project level under “Project Settings” -> “Repositories” -> “Settings”

Existing Repos

I will share here few commands to set your Azure DevOps default branch. There is a popular way to do that through Git cmdlet by renaming the master branch, I will share here another approach which consist in creating a new branch and locking the old one through Azure DevOps CLI extension.

In order to proceed you will need the following prerequisites :

Azure CLI
Azure DevOps CLI extension
jq, a lightweight and flexible command-line JSON processor

Set up variables

Since these variables are re-used, a locals block makes this more maintainable.

organization=”https://dev.azure.com/organization_name/"targetBranch=”main”

Connection

Connect directly through Azure AD or use a Personal Access Token that has the minimum privileges :

Read privilege a the Projet and Team level.
Full privilege at the Code level.

az login# ORaz devops login

Script & Workflow

List all our Azure DevOps projects
List our Azure DevOps repositories
List our ref to determine the current default branch
Create the new ref if it doesn’t exist
Update the repo with the new default branch
Lock the old default branch

The script →

Conclusion

Changing a default Git branch might not be as simple as mentioned in the upper chapter, some additional steps might be needed in specific context like when the default branch is used to publish application or when application are directly plugged in your default branch.

Those are some recommendations that I used to share :

Use the same default branch name for all your repos.
Fit with global rules. I would say that when the Git project define a default branch name, it’s a global rule. So I will use main as default branch.
Use a custom branch to publish into production.

I hope you enjoyed the article.

See You in the Cloud.

Jamesdld