Git Branch – How to Switch Branch Names in Git

branchgit

There may be more than one way to ask this question, so here's a desciption of the problem. I was working on master and committed some stuff and then decided I wanted to put that work on hold. I backed up a few commits and then branched from before I started my crap work. Practically this works fine, I just now have a different branch as my main development branch. I'm wondering how I could change things around so I'm working on master again but it doesn't have my junk work and said work is on a different branch.

Some ways this could be asked/solved:
How do I rename my master branch to something else and then rename something else to master?
How do I back up master and then cause all commits I've backed up past to be on a different branch?

Thanks for all the (quick) answers! They're all good.

Best Answer

In addition to the other comments, you may find the -m (move) switch to git-branch helpful. You could rename your old master to something else, then rename your new branch to master:

git branch -m master crap_work
git branch -m previous_master master

Related Solutions

GitHub – Renaming a Branch

As mentioned, delete the old one on GitHub and re-push, though the commands used are a bit more verbose than necessary:

git push origin :name_of_the_old_branch_on_github
git push origin new_name_of_the_branch_that_is_local

Dissecting the commands a bit, the git push command is essentially:

git push <remote> <local_branch>:<remote_branch>

So doing a push with no local_branch specified essentially means "take nothing from my local repository, and make it the remote branch". I've always thought this to be completely kludgy, but it's the way it's done.

As of Git 1.7 there is an alternate syntax for deleting a remote branch:

git push origin --delete name_of_the_remote_branch

As mentioned by @void.pointer in the comments

Note that you can combine the 2 push operations:

git push origin :old_branch new_branch

This will both delete the old branch and push the new one.

This can be turned into a simple alias that takes the remote, original branch and new branch name as arguments, in ~/.gitconfig:

[alias]
    branchm = "!git branch -m $2 $3 && git push $1 :$2 $3 -u #"

Usage:

git branchm origin old_branch new_branch

Note that positional arguments in shell commands were problematic in older (pre 2.8?) versions of Git, so the alias might vary according to the Git version. See this discussion for details.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

GitHub – Renaming a Branch

Related Question