GitHub Actions: Better support for alternative default branch names

We’ve made some changes in GitHub Actions to better support communities who have chosen to move away from using master as their default branch name.

We have updated all of our starter workflows to use a new $default-branch macro rather than the previously hardcoded master. You can take advantage of this feature in your custom starter workflow templates as well.

In addition, we have renamed the default branch for most of the GitHub-authored actions from master to main. All of your workflows that reference the old branch name will still work. However, you’ll see a prompt to change to the new name when you edit the workflow on the web.

This change is one of many changes GitHub is making to support projects and maintainers that want to rename their default branch. To learn more about the changes we’re making, see github/renaming.