In June 2020, GitHub announced that is was moving the default branch name from master to the more neutral name, main. GitLab followed suit in a few months later. Tobie Langel makes the salient point on why changing the name is a good thing: So master is not only racist, it’s also a silly name in the first place. The purpose of this post is summarise some of the challenges we faced when moving from master to main, with the goal that if you decide to make the same change, you’ll hopefully avoid some of the issues.