Creating a new empty branch for a new project

Question

We are using a git repository to store our project. We have our branches departing from the original branch. But now we want to create a small new project to track some docu

Answer 1

The best solution is to create a new branch with --orphan option as shown below

git checkout --orphan 

By this you will be able to create a new branch and directly checkout to the new branch. It will be a parentless branch.

By default the --orphan option doesn't remove the files in the working directory, so you can delete the working directory files by this:

git rm --cached -r

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In details what the --orphan does:

--orphan
Create a new orphan branch, named , started from and switch to it. The first commit made on this new branch will have no parents and it will be the root of a new history totally disconnected from all the other branches and commits.

The index and the working tree are adjusted as if you had previously run git checkout . This allows you to start a new history that records a set of paths similar to by easily running git commit -a to make the root commit.

This can be useful when you want to publish the tree from a commit without exposing its full history. You might want to do this to publish an open source branch of a project whose current tree is "clean", but whose full history contains proprietary or otherwise encumbered bits of code.

If you want to start a disconnected history that records a set of paths that is totally different from the one of , then you should clear the index and the working tree right after creating the orphan branch by running git rm -rf . from the top level of the working tree. Afterwards you will be ready to prepare your new files, repopulating the working tree, by copying them from elsewhere, extracting a tarball, etc.