Why does my 'git branch' have no master?

Question

I\'m a git newbie and I keep reading about a \"master\" branch. Is \"master\" just a conventional name that people used or does it have special meaning like HEAD

Answer 1

In my case there was a develop branch but no master branch. Therefore I cloned the repository pointing the newly created HEAD to the existing branch. Then I created the missing master branch and update HEAD to point to the new master branch.

git clone git:repositoryname --branch otherbranch
git checkout -b master
git update-ref HEAD master
git push --set-upstream origin master

Answer 2

master is just the name of a branch, there's nothing magic about it except it's created by default when a new repository is created.

You can add it back with git checkout -b master.

Answer 3

It seems there must be at least one local commit on the master branch to do:

git push -u origin master

So if you did git init . and then git remote add origin ..., you still need to do:

git add ...
git commit -m "..."

Answer 4

I actually had the same problem with a completely new repository. I had even tried creating one with git checkout -b master, but it would not create the branch. I then realized if I made some changes and committed them, git created my master branch.

Answer 5

if it is a new repo you've cloned, it may still be empty, in which case:

git push -u origin master

should likely sort it out.

(did in my case. not sure this is the same issue, thought i should post this just incase. might help others.)

Answer 6

To checkout a branch which does not exist locally but is in the remote repo you could use this command:

git checkout -t -b master origin/master