Using GitVersion when your default branch is not called 'master'

The Black Live Matter movement has engendered many conversations, hopefully starting changes for the good. Often these changes involve the use of language. One such change has been the move to stop using the name master and switching to the name main for the trunk/default branch in Git repos. This change is moving apace driven by tools such as GitHub and Azure DevOps .

I have recently had need, for the first time since swapping my default branch name in new repos to main, to use Semantic Version and the GitVersion tool.

'Out of the box' I hit a problem. The current shipping version of GitVersion (5.3.2) by default makes the assumption that's the trunk branch is called master. Hence, throws an exception if this branch cannot be found.

Looking at the project's repo you can find PRs, tagged for a future release, that address this constraint. However, you don't have to wait for a new version to ship to use this excellent tool in repos with other branch naming conventions.

The solution is to create an override file GitVersion.yml in the root of your repo with the following content to alter the Regex used to find branches. Note that the content below is as a minimum, you can override any other default configuration values in this file as needed.

1branches:  
2   master:  
3      regex: ^master$|^main$

With this override file the default branch can be either master or main.

You can of course use a different name or limit the Regex to a single name as you need.