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Preferred Git Branch Naming Conventions

There appears to be a lot of advice and “best practice” recommendations when it comes to Git branch naming conventions. So much of it has to do with the repo and the organization. For example, a massive mono-repo would need very comprehensive naming conventions to keep track of all the simultaneous work going on and who is doing it, whereas a small, personal repo might only need to refer to the issue.

Since I prefer smaller, composable repos (the UNIX philosophy applied to Git management) my conventions are rather simple:

• Consolidate related issues as needed into single issue
• Create a branch for a single issue (thread)
• Start all branch names with the issue number and a dash
• Names must be readable ASCII identifiers
• Names must match ERE ^([0-9]+)-([a-z0-9-]{5,20})$
• Main branch always called main (less typing)

Related Code

• git config --global init.defaultBranch main

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