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?
When I do git branch on the clone that I have, I only see 1 single branch - the one I'm on. No "master" at all. If I type git checkout master (as I see in alot of tutorials or guides), I get
error: pathspec 'master' did not match any file(s) known to git.
I'm just confused as to why my clone doesn't have a master that everyone seems to imply that it always exists.
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git
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
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.)
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 "..."
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
I ran into the same issue and figured out the problem. When you initialize a repository there aren't actually any branches. When you start a project run git add . and then git commit and the master branch will be created.
Without checking anything in you have no master branch. In that case you need to follow the steps other people here have suggested.
If you create a new repository from the Github web GUI, you sometimes get the name 'main' instead of 'master'. By using the command git status from your terminal you'd see which location you are. In some cases, you'd see origin/main.
If you are trying to push your app to a cloud service via CLI then use 'main', not 'master'.
example:
git push heroku main
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.
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.
Source: Stackoverflow.com