How to replace master branch in Git entirely from another branch

Question

I have two branches in my Git repository    master seotweaks  created originally from master    I created seotweaks with the intention of quickly merging it back into master  However  that was three months ago and the code in this branch is 13 versions ahead of master   It has effectively become our working master branch as all the code in master is more or less obsolete now   Very bad practice I know  lesson learned   Do you know how I can replace all of the contents of the master branch with those in seotweaks   I could just delete everything in master and merge  but this does not feel like best practice

User · Answer

What about using git branch -m to rename the master branch to another one, then rename seotweaks branch to master? Something like this:

git branch -m master old-master
git branch -m seotweaks master
git push -f origin master

This might remove commits in origin master, please check your origin master before running git push -f origin master.

User · Answer

Since seotweaks was originally created as a branch from master  merging it back in is a good idea  However if you are in a situation where one of your branches is not really a branch from master or your history is so different that you just want to obliterate the master branch in favor of the new branch that you ve been doing the work on you can do this   git push  -f  origin seotweaks master   This is especially helpful if you are getting this error      remote rejected  master  deletion of the current branch prohibited    And you are not using GitHub and don t have access to the  Administration  tab to change the default branch for your remote repository  Furthermore  this won t cause down time or race conditions as you may encounter by deleting master   git push origin  master

User · Answer

You should be able to use the  ours  merge strategy to overwrite master with seotweaks like this   git checkout seotweaks git merge -s ours master git checkout master git merge seotweaks   The result should be your master is now essentially seotweaks      -s ours is short for --strategy ours   From the docs about the  ours  strategy      This resolves any number of heads  but the resulting tree of the merge is always that of the current branch head  effectively ignoring all changes from all other branches  It is meant to be used to supersede old development history of side branches  Note that this is different from the -Xours option to the recursive merge strategy    Update from comments  If you get fatal  refusing to merge unrelated histories  then change the second line to this  git merge --allow-unrelated-histories -s ours master

User · Answer

You can rename remove master on remote  but this will be an issue if lots of people have based their work on the remote master branch and have pulled that branch in their local repo  That might not be the case here since everyone seems to be working on branch  seotweaks    In that case you can  git remote --show may not work   Make a git remote show to check how your remote is declared within your local repo  I will assume  origin    Regarding GitHub  house9 comments   I had to do one additional step  click the  Admin  button on GitHub and set the  Default Branch  to something other than  master   then put it back afterwards    git branch -m master master-old    rename master on local git push origin  master            delete master on remote git push origin master-old         create master-old on remote git checkout -b master seotweaks   create a new local master on top of seotweaks git push origin master             create master on remote   But again    if other users try to pull while master is deleted on remote  their pulls will fail   no such ref on remote   when master is recreated on remote  a pull will attempt to merge that new master on their local  now old  master  lots of conflicts  They actually need to reset --hard their local master to the remote master branch they will fetch  and forget about their current master

User · Answer

I found this to be the best way of doing this  I had an issue with my server not letting me delete    On the server that hosts the origin repository  type the following from a directory inside the repository   git config receive denyDeleteCurrent ignore   On your workstation   git branch -m master vabandoned                   Rename master on local git branch -m newBranch master                    Locally rename branch newBranch to master git push origin  master                           Delete the remote s master git push origin master refs heads master          Push the new master to the remote git push origin abandoned refs heads abandoned    Push the old master to the remote   Back on the server that hosts the origin repository   git config receive denyDeleteCurrent true   Credit to the author of blog post http   www mslinn com blog  p 772

[git] How to replace master branch in Git, entirely, from another branch?

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