Issue
I’d like to create a github repository and rename the main branch to master.
If I create a new repository on github and do
git init
git add README.md
git commit -m "first commit"
git branch -M master
I get
error: refname refs/heads/master not found
fatal: Branch rename failed
so I seem to somehow not understand git well enough. What’s the issue here?
I must have gotten confused when I was playing around with the above. The following happens:
git init create the repository
git add README.md adds the file
git commit -m "first commit" adds the file to the master branch since that still default for git
so I never have to rename it in the first place. Now Github uses the default main, which can be changed in settings -> repositories on github.com
Solution
If README.md doesn’t actually exist, git checkout -B master will do what you want. git branch -M is expecting a full ref that actually refers to something, not the stub git init (or git checkout --orphan) creates. I’d agree it "should" handle this case, whether it’s worth a patch is up to anybody capable of writing a good one. Shouldn’t be too hard.
My test case that led to this answer was simply running your commands in an empty directory; that produced your reported symptom. Running them in a directory that (already) includes a README.md works the way you want, i.e. doesn’t produce that error. Did you perhaps expect git init to create a default README.md?
Answered By – jthill
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