How to replace master branch in git, entirely, from another branch?
Possible Duplicate:
Change the current branch to master in git
I have two branches in my git repo:
I created seotweaks with the intention of quickly merging it back into master , however that was 3 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.
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.
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 .
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:
reset --hard their local master to the remote/master branch they will fetch, and forget about their current master.