til/github/tell-gh-what-the-default-repo-is.md

Tell gh What The Default Repo Is

I recently forked dkarter/dotfiles as a way of bootstrapping a robust dotfile config for a new machine that I could start making customizations to. I'm maintaining a my-dotfiles branch and keep things in sync with the original upstream repo.

When trying to go to my fork of the repo (jbranchaud/dotfiles) in the web with the gh CLI tool, I ran into a weird issue. It was instead opening up to dkarter/dotfiles.

gh was under the wrong impression which repo should be considered the default. To clarify things for gh, there is a command to set the default repo.

$ gh repo set-default jbranchaud/dotfiles
✓ Set jbranchaud/dotfiles as the default repository for the current directory

Now when I run gh repo view --web, it opens the browser to my fork of the dotfiles.

But where does this setting live?

Opening this repo's .git/config file I can see a section for the origin remote that includes a new line for gh-resolved. This being set to base tells gh that this remote is the one to treat as the default repo.

[remote "origin"]
	url = git@github.com:jbranchaud/dotfiles.git
	fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
	gh-resolved = base

See gh repo set-default --help for more details.