What is a base branch?

[samaursa]

Hi,

I'm a bit confused about the concept of a base branch in lazygit.

• What exactly is considered the base branch?
• Is it always the upstream branch, or does it default to something like main or dev?
• Can the base branch be changed?

The reason I ask is that in my case, I see ↓7 displayed for both my current branch and dev. However, main is quite far behind, to the point where the number 7 wouldn't make sense if it were based on main.

I'd appreciate any clarification on this!

Thanks!

[stefanhaller]

The base branch is not the upstream branch; it is the branch that your feature branch was supposedly branched off of, and will probably be merged back into. It's a heuristic, lazygit can only guess which branch this is. It uses the concept of "main branches" for this heuristic (and picks the closest one of those); these are "master" and "main" by default, but you can change this with the git.mainBranches config.

To see which branch lazygit considers to be the base branch of a given feature branch, press u on it; the menu item "View divergence from base branch" shows in parentheses which one it is. Invoking this command also shows in more detail how far ahead and/or behind you are from the base branch.

Let me know if some of this is still not clear.

[samaursa]

That makes sense, thank you!

I had the option for mainBranches set as master, main and dev. Changing it to dev and then main and removing master addressed the issue (master wasn't even a branch in our repo).

  mainBranches:
    - dev
    - main

With the above, looks like the arrow/number cue is working as expected.