Magit set upstream to origin/master automatically

Question

Is there a way to set the upstream of a branch automatically in magit?

I know I can select it interactively but for feature branches I set it to master 99% of the times so I was wondering if it can be done at branch creation automatically.

Thank you!

Answer 1

Magit's branch creation commands use git branch new-branch start-point, which in some cases automatically sets start-point as the upstream. Unfortunately it does not do so in all cases in which it should do so IMO.

The relevant documentation is this:

       branch.autoSetupMerge
           Tells git branch, git switch and git checkout to set up new
           branches so that git-pull(1) will appropriately merge from the
           starting point branch. Note that even if this option is not set,
           this behavior can be chosen per-branch using the --track and
           --no-track options. The valid settings are: false — no automatic
           setup is done; true — automatic setup is done when the starting
           point is a remote-tracking branch; always —  automatic setup is
           done when the starting point is either a local branch or
           remote-tracking branch. This option defaults to true.

So you want to set that variable to always.

Additionally you might want to read about the magit-branch-adjust-remote-upstream-alist option.

These things are described in more details in the Branch Commands and Branch Git Variables sections of the Magit manual. I recommend you also read the surrounding sections.

Answer 2

Starting from Git version 2.35, you can set now set branch.autoSetupMerge = inherit. It will inherit the tracking configuration from the starting point and set is on your new branch.

That is, if you have a main branch that is tracking upstream origin/main and you create a new branch starting at main, your new branch will be set to track origin/main instead of main as with branch.autoSetupMerge = always.

I got this information from this answer.