renaming the default branch of a repo in Gitea

created on

August 29, 2025

I was already tired for a while that the default repo name in git was master. So I took the opportunity when updating Gitea to rename the default branch of the corresponding git repos to main.

Rename master to main in my ’local’ repo with git branch -m master main and push it to Gitea with git push -u origin main

Now Gitea has two branches main and master for that repo. In order to be able to delete branch master, branch main has to be set as the default branch of that repo.

In Gitea, open the repo view and click Settings.

In the settings view, click on Branches. In the Default Branch panel, select branch main and click Update Default Branch.

Delete branch master in Gitea with git push origin --delete master.