Create a new empty branch in Git

new empty git branch.md

$ git checkout --orphan NEWBRANCH
$ git rm -rf .

--orphan creates a new branch, but it starts without any commit. After running the above command you are on a new branch "NEWBRANCH", and the first commit you create from this state will start a new history without any ancestry.

You can then start adding files and commit them and they will live in their own branch. If you take a look at the log, you will see that it is isolated from the original log.

Hi, with this are we able to merge to master branch when done with the changes?

Wow, Can I replace master with the NEWBRANCH ? And how :)

You could first delete branch master.
git branch -D master.

Then create a new branch named "master" off of the NEWBRANCH.
git checkout NEWBRANCH
git checkout -b master

You could first delete branch master.
.> git branch -D master.

Then create a new branch named "master" off of the NEWBRANCH.
git checkout NEWBRANCH
git checkout -b master

You could also reset master to NEWBRANCH by doing:
git checkout master
git reset --hard NEWBRANCH

which removes the need of first deleting it

@Ogollah I know I'm late to the party but, yes you can merge master into the new banch. You can even fast forward the new branch to master's state (which will basically move the new branch's ref next to master's)

Legend! Thank you.

I created a branch initial before creating master. I wanted to squash merge a single commit into master but couldn't create a PR and if I created a branch it would have just contained all of the commits I wanted to squash. I resolved this with:

git checkout --orphan master
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"
git push --set-upstream origin master

Then updated the Default Branch to master in Settings -> Branches.

hello, but where do we write the code

A complete example from a 2021 perspective starts with renaming master -> main. Then:

$ git checkout --orphan NEWBRANCH
$ git rm -rf .
$ touch .gitignore && git add .gitignore
$ git commit -m "Initialize with .gitignore"
$ git checkout main
$ git reset --hard NEWBRANCH

how to create new empty branch in repository plz update command

deploy_empty_branch(){
  commit_id=$(git commit-tree -m "New empty $1 branch" 4b825dc642cb6eb9a060e54bf8d69288fbee4904)
  git push origin ${commit_id}:refs/heads/$1
}

deploy_empty_branch gh-pages

https://www.edwardthomson.com/blog/pushing_an_empty_branch.html

instead of creating a new empty branch this wiped all my project files and weeks of work are now gone :)