Why does my 'git branch' have no master?

I'm a git newbie and I keep reading about a "master" branch. Is "master" just a conventional name that people used or does it have special meaning like HEAD?

When I do git branch on the clone that I have, I only see 1 single branch - the one I'm on. No "master" at all. If I type git checkout master (as I see in alot of tutorials or guides), I get

error: pathspec 'master' did not match any file(s) known to git.

I'm just confused as to why my clone doesn't have a master that everyone seems to imply that it always exists.

Most Git repositories use master as the main (and default) branch - if you initialize a new Git repo via git init, it will have master checked out by default.

However, if you clone a repository, the default branch you have is whatever the remote's HEAD points to (HEAD is actually a symbolic ref that points to a branch name). So if the repository you cloned had a HEAD pointed to, say, foo, then your clone will just have a foo branch.

The remote you cloned from might still have a master branch (you could check with git ls-remote origin master), but you wouldn't have created a local version of that branch by default, because git clone only checks out the remote's HEAD.

To checkout a branch which does not exist locally but is in the remote repo you could use this command:

git checkout -t -b master origin/master

master is just the name of a branch, there's nothing magic about it except it's created by default when a new repository is created.

You can add it back with git checkout -b master.

I actually had the same problem with a completely new repository. I had even tried creating one with git checkout -b master, but it would not create the branch. I then realized if I made some changes and committed them, git created my master branch.

In my case there was a develop branch but no master branch. Therefore I cloned the repository pointing the newly created HEAD to the existing branch. Then I created the missing master branch and update HEAD to point to the new master branch.

git clone git:repositoryname --branch otherbranch
git checkout -b master
git update-ref HEAD master
git push --set-upstream origin master

if it is a new repo you've cloned, it may still be empty, in which case:

git push -u origin master

should likely sort it out.

(did in my case. not sure this is the same issue, thought i should post this just incase. might help others.)

I ran into the same issue and figured out the problem. When you initialize a repository there aren't actually any branches. When you start a project run git add . and then git commit and the master branch will be created.

Without checking anything in you have no master branch. In that case you need to follow the steps other people here have suggested.

It seems there must be at least one local commit on the master branch to do:

git push -u origin master

So if you did git init . and then git remote add origin ..., you still need to do:

git add ...
git commit -m "..."

If you create a new repository from the Github web GUI, you sometimes get the name 'main' instead of 'master'. By using the command git status from your terminal you'd see which location you are. In some cases, you'd see origin/main.

If you are trying to push your app to a cloud service via CLI then use 'main', not 'master'.

example: git push heroku main

I had the same problem. I executed the "git init", but the main/master branch was not created. Possibly because I used a branch with another name and this one became the default. The solution that worked for me was:

1. I created the branch "main"

git checkout -b main

2. I went to the option Settings->Branches of my directory and changed it to the new branch "main"

3. With this change, Github itself notified me that my default branch (main) was behind my other branch and opened the window for me to confirm a PR applying the changes to the branch main. And following this, merging the pull request.