I’ve started getting rid of references to master branches in all of my repositories. It’s rather easy with Gitlab, but I thought I would document the steps for anyone struggling with it.

Click Repository -> Branches:

Click New Branch and name it main:

Click Settings -> Repository:

Expand Default Branch and choose main:

Scroll down and expand Protect Branches, protect main branch and allow Maintainers to merge and push.

Click Unprotect next to the master branch:

Click Repository -> Branches:

Delete “master” branch:

That’s all there is to it. I am disappointed that there doesn’t seem to be a way to set this at my account level, maybe they’ll do that in the future.