How to Create a Master Branch in a Bare Git Repository

1. Create a Master Branch in a Bare Git Repository
2. Conclusion

You can only push and pull from an empty git repository. You are likely to encounter errors when you try to checkout references in a bare git repository.

This article will discuss creating a master branch in an empty git repository.

Create a Master Branch in a Bare Git Repository

As we had mentioned earlier, you cannot do much in an empty git repository. Let’s try to checkout the master branch in a bare git repo.

We will create an empty directory called Test-Repo.git and initialize a bare repository.

Command:

$ git init --bare

Output:

We can not proceed with development in a bare git repository. To create a master branch, we must create a test-clone repository and clone it there.

We will create a test-clone folder and initialize a git repository.

Command:

$ git init

Output:

Next, we will clone our bare repository to our test-clone repo.

Command:

$ git clone C:/Test-Repo.git

Output:

Then create a README.md file and commit it to our test-clone repository.

Command:

$ touch README.md

Next, we will add the file for commit.

Command:

$ git add README.md
$ git commit -m "Initial Commit"

Output:

What’s left is to push our master branch and the changes to the bare git repository.

Command:

$ git push C:/Test-Repo.git master

We have treated our bare repository as a hosted server, but instead of git push origin master, we used the path to our bare repo.

The command above should create a master branch in our bare repo with our "Initial Commit".

Output:

Let’s check if we have the master branch and its commit in our bare repository.

Command:

$ git branch
$ git log

Output:

Conclusion

You cannot develop in a bare repository. Your best option is to clone it to another git repo and push a branch from there.

When cloning, be sure to enter the right path to the bare repo.