Mike Griffin

I’ve been rewriting my other site over the last few months and I was using a different branch to develop on. It has finally come to the time where I’m happy to release it.

But I ran into a problem, because it has changed so radically, it has veered a long way away from the master branch that was originally there. To fix this I wanted to rename the master branch to something else and move the develop branch to be the new master.

After some searching, I found a site that had instructions on how to do it. It’s a nice simple process and it worked out very easily. I’m going to repeat it here in case the other page ever disappears.

• On Github, set the default branch to something other than master
• Rename the local branches

git branch -m master legacy
git branch -m dev master

• Delete the master branch on Github

git push origin :master

• Push up the new master to Github

git push origin master:refs/heads/master

• Push up the legacy code to Github

git push origin legacy:refs/heads/legacy

• Delete the old branch on Github

git push origin :dev

That’s it, there is now a new master and the old master is in a branch called legacy.