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   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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

Most Git repositories use master as the main  and default  branch - if you initialize a new Git repo via git init  it will have master checked out by default   However  if you clone a repository  the default branch you have is whatever the remote s HEAD points to  HEAD is actually a symbolic ref that points to a branch name   So if the repository you cloned had a HEAD pointed to  say  foo  then your clone will just have a foo branch   The remote you cloned from might still have a master branch  you could check with git ls-remote origin master   but you wouldn t have created a local version of that branch by default  because git clone only checks out the remote s HEAD

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

[git] Why does my 'git branch' have no master?

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