Introducing the main branch for Drupal core

We are excited to announce that the main branch is now the official Drupal core development branch. Using a main branch aligns Drupal core with the best practices of industry and major open-source projects. This move is the final step of infrastructure changes that began in 2023.

Going forward, main is the new, primary development trunk for Drupal core. Most active work and outstanding issues currently filed against 11.x should now be targeted at main. The 11.x branch will remain for Drupal-11-specific issues, while Drupal 12 development will happen in the main branch.

Simplifying issue management

With this update, it will be easier for contributors to identify the primary development branch. Contributors don't need to know what the current development version number is.

This change also eliminates the overhead of mass updates to change the version number on open issues. The use of version-specific development branches required a cumbersome cycle of new branches and mass updating of issues with each major version release. Using a main branch significantly simplifies our release and issue management.

What contributors need to do

Use main for most issues

Most merge requests for Drupal Core should now be submitted to the main branch. In general, only backports or issues that do not affect Drupal 12 should be filed against other branches.

Update local checkouts

If you have any local clones of the repository, you should update them:

git fetch origin
git branch --track main origin/main

Update merge requests

Merge requests will be automatically updated to target the main branch this week, so there should not be a need to do this manually. However this retargeting will not include a rebase or adding the main branch to the issue fork, which may be necessary steps. These could be done when other changes are being made to the MR. To make contributors' work easier, MRs that cleanly apply to main will be committed for now, even if the main branch does not exist in the MR.

Update the issue version number

Issues against 11.x on Drupal.org will have the version number updated to main via an automated process within the next few days. Updating issues to point to main in the meantime is OK but does not need to be done manually in bulk.

We appreciate your patience and flexibility as we have worked to implement this important step in modernizing the Drupal core development workflow.