Change a Git remote HEAD to point to something besides master

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There was almost the same question on GitHub a year ago.

The idea was to rename the master branch:

git branch -m master development
git branch -m published master
git push -f origin master

Making master have what you want people to use, and do all other work in branches.

(a “git-symbolic-ref HEAD refs/head/published” would not be propagated to the remote repo)

This is similar to “How do I delete origin/master in Git“.

As said in this thread: (emphasis mine)

“git clone” creates only a single local branch.
To do that, it looks at the HEAD ref of the remote repo, and creates a local branch with the same name as the remote branch referenced by it.

So to wrap that up, you have repo A and clone it:

  • HEAD references refs/heads/master and that exists
    -> you get a local branch called master, starting from origin/master

  • HEAD references refs/heads/anotherBranch and that exists
    -> you get a local branch called anotherBranch, starting from origin/anotherBranch

  • HEAD references refs/heads/master and that doesn’t exist
    -> “git clone” complains

Not sure if there’s any way to directly modify the HEAD ref in a repo.

(which is the all point of your question, I know 😉 )

Maybe the only way would be a “publication for the poor”, where you:

 $ git-symbolic-ref HEAD refs/head/published
 $ git-update-server-info
 $ rsync -az .git/* server:/local_path_to/git/myRepo.git/

But that would involve write access to the server, which is not always possible.

As I explain in “Git: Correct way to change Active Branch in a bare repository?“, git remote set-head wouldn’t change anything on the remote repo.

It would only change the remote tracking branch stored locally in your local repo, in remotes/<name>/HEAD.

With Git 2.29 (Q4 2020), “git remote set-head(man)” that failed still said something that hints the operation went through, which was misleading.

See commit 5a07c6c (17 Sep 2020) by Christian Schlack (cschlack).
(Merged by Junio C Hamano — gitster — in commit 39149df, 22 Sep 2020)

remote: don’t show success message when set-head fails

Signed-off-by: Christian Schlack

Suppress the message ‘origin/HEAD set to master’ in case of an error.

$ git remote set-head origin -a
error: Not a valid ref: refs/remotes/origin/master
origin/HEAD set to master

More Related Contents:

  1. How do I push a new local branch to a remote Git repository and track it too?
  2. Git branching: master vs. origin/master vs. remotes/origin/master
  3. What are the differences between local branch, local tracking branch, remote branch and remote tracking branch?
  4. Git submodule to track remote branch
  5. How to pull remote branch from somebody else’s repo
  6. Move the most recent commit(s) to a new branch with Git
  7. How do you create a remote Git branch?
  8. What is the best (and safest) way to merge a Git branch into master?
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  10. Cleaning up old remote git branches
  11. Using Git, show all commits that are in one branch, but not the other(s)
  12. Completely remove files from Git repo and remote on GitHub
  13. How do I clone all remote branches?
  14. How do I fetch all Git branches?
  15. How do I remove local (untracked) files from the current Git working tree?
  16. How can I clone all remote branches?
  17. How do I merge changes to a single file, rather than merging commits?
  18. Remote origin already exists on ‘git push’ to a new repository
  19. Git merge hotfix branch into feature branch
  20. How to update a git clone –mirror?
  21. Find out a Git branch creator
  22. Git push error: “origin does not appear to be a git repository”
  23. Git Diff of same files in two directories always result in “renamed”
  24. Git branch name – case sensitive or insensitive?
  25. How to keep a branch synchronized/updated with master?
  26. Git: Merge a Remote branch locally
  27. Changing the Git remote ‘push to’ default
  28. How can I find the location of origin/master in git, and how do I change it?
  29. When doing a ‘git push’, what does ‘–set-upstream’ do?
  30. Commit a file to a Different Branch Without Checkout

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