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Change a Git remote HEAD to point to something besides master

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:

  1. When cloning the repo, there this,

    warning: remote HEAD refers to nonexistent ref, unable to checkout.

    That's confusing and inconvenient.

  2. 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.

Solution

  • 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 all besides the 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