Do you need a local master branch?

I noticed recently that I’ve (almost) never used a local master branch in Git. I only use it in simple one-off playground repos that I don’t plan to support and never in professional development or in “serious” pet-projects.

So, is it really required?

I’d say: it’s mostly useless to have a local master branch in Git. I’ve googled and found this article by Alec Benzer and totally agree with what he said, but let me put it my own post.

Most probably your Git workflow forbids any pushes in the master branch on the server: it is either updated by pull requests or by a team member with special access permissions (“gatekeepers”). So, you rarely push your local master to its remote counterpart. Moreover, you’ll need to keep it in sync with the remote master or it will become stale. Extra work with no profit!

Every time you need a master use origin/master (assuming your remote is origin), just don’t forget to fetch the latest remote state.

E.g. starting a new branch from master:

Checking the difference between any branch and the latest master:

Rebasing you branch on the latest master:

You can even checkout to the latest master without really checking out any branch:

You’ll appear in a detached HEAD state and won’t be able to commit. Some tools like gradle-release plugin won’t work, but, hey!, do you really want to release from a local checkout?

Thanks for reading to the end. May your merges be conflictless!