How could I move all my files and folder to the master branch in GitHub?

Question

I have a GitHub repository with 2 Branches: master , engineers. All my files and folders are in engineers branch. The master branch is empty.

I downloaded the GitHub Desktop, login using my GitHub account, then clone the project.

Now, I want to move everything in engineers branch to master branch. I follow different tutorials to merge them using GitHub Desktop. Here what I did:

1. In the GitHub Desktop client, switch to the master branch.
2. Go to Branch > Merge into Current Branch.
3. In the merge window, I select the engineers branch, and here is the problem.

I cannot do merge because I got this message 'Unable to merge unrelated history in this repository. '

I am new to GitHub, what is the problem? What I missed? how could I move all my files and folder to the master branch?

Answer 1

Remove your current master branch and then create it new from the engineers branch, so that you then have two branches with an identical status.

First step:

git checkout engineers

Then delete the old master branch with:

git branch -D master

Now, you have just one branch, which is named engineers. Now you can create from there a new branch with:

git branch master

And then navigate to this new branch:

git checkout master

You can also do this in one command:

git checkout -b master

Now you have your goal: a master branch with all the current files and changes as the engineers branch.

But be aware (like @Thomas said), the "move files" activity does not exist in Git. In Git you have ONE main-branch (master, main or sometimes develop/dev) and from there you create new branches and add the code/file changes from these branches (they are also called feature-branches, in gitflow) into the main branch with PR's or merges.

I recommend you to look at the literature to understand it!