How can I completely empty the master branch in Git?

Question

I would like to completely empty the master branch in Git. For now, I would also like to keep all other branches which have been branched from master.

Is this possib

Answer 1

You could try to reset the master branch to the first commit with git checkout master; git reset --hard ${sha-of-first-commit} and then amend that first commit to remove the file s in it.

This should give you a pristine master branch, and leave all the others untouched, but since you are rewriting history, all repository that cloned yours will need to be fixed.

Answer 2

That's actually called "delete old master branch and create new from scratch"

This will create a new master branch pointing to initial commit:

git branch -D master
git checkout -b master <initial commit hash>

This will create a totally new master branch unrelated to whatever you had:

git branch -D master
git checkout --orphan master
git rm -rf *

But actually you can simply save current repository to some other place and create a new repository instead.

Answer 3

how about checkout to the master branch of your local repository and delete everything. then push this branch to the remote branch(origin)

do u remove empty the content of the master branch or the branch itself?

Answer 4

Create an Orphan Branch

First, you need to move or delete your current master branch. Personally, I prefer to move it aside rather than delete it. After that, you simply create a new branch with no parents by using the --orphan flag. For example:

git branch -m master old_master
git checkout --orphan master

Since the current branch now has no history, some commands may fail with errors like fatal: bad default revision 'HEAD' until after you make your first commit on the new master branch. This is normal, and is the same behavior you see in freshly-initialized repositories.

Answer 5

Other answers suggest creating a fresh master branch (as you would have in empty repository). But having master without history is not a good practice. It makes it hard to use rebase as you can never rebase the first commit. The first commit of master on any repository should be empty. There is a low-level plumbing solution to this:

Fix using low-level plumbing commands

First you get an empty tree hash:

$ git hash-object -t tree /dev/null
4b825dc642cb6eb9a060e54bf8d69288fbee4904

Then you use the tree hash to create an empty commit

$ git commit-tree -m "inital commit" 4b825dc642cb6eb9a060e54bf8d69288fbee4904
a5c0737b92e5e5d4502e15b93d7a46d1e17b2b22

And finally you reset master to that commit

$ git reset --hard a5c0737b92e5e5d4502e15b93d7a46d1e17b2b22

It's further described in my blogpost.

Answer 6

Here is something that is probably bad practice but works in a jam (building on top of aragaer's solution)

git branch -D master
git checkout --orphan master
git rm -rf *

After this, to submit a PR into this branch from a development branch currently being worked on without issue, do

git checkout development-branch-name
git rebase master
git push -f development-branch-name

Now you can submit a PR from development-branch-name into master without running into There isn't anything to compare. Nothing to compare, branches are entirely different commit histories issue on GitHub.

I use this when I init a repo in a currently-underway project directory and want code review done via the GitHub UI on all the code in the project directory.