How do I set a Git remote's HEAD reference to point to something besides "master"?
My project has a policy not to use a "master" branch (all branches are to have meaningful names). Furthermore, the canonical master repository is only accessible via ssh://, with no shell access (like GitHub or Unfuddle).
My problem is that the remote repository still has a HEAD reference to refs/heads/master, but I need it to point to a different branch. This is causing two problems:
When cloning the repo, there this,
warning: remote HEAD refers to nonexistent ref, unable to checkout.
That's confusing and inconvenient.
The web-based code browser depends on HEAD as a basis for browsing the tree. I need HEAD to point to a valid branch, then.
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 theHEAD 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
referencesrefs/heads/master
and that exists
-> you get a local branch calledmaster
, starting fromorigin/master
HEAD references
refs/heads/anotherBranch
and that exists
-> you get a local branch calledanotherBranch
, starting fromorigin/anotherBranch
HEAD references
refs/heads/master
and that doesn't exist
-> "git clone
" complainsNot 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 whenset-head
failsSigned-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