Question

I have cloned an empty repository. I have an empty master branch. I need to branch out to a dev branch and start my development code there. Later I might not even need the master branch but some stable branch to keep my stable code.

When I use git branch dev it says fatal: not a valid object ‘master’.

But when I commit a file inside the master it allows me to branch out.

Answer 1

To have a branch, git requires you to have at least one commit, then it will create the master branch from its reference.

If you are going to delete master afterwards, and you already have multiple branches, you must:

git checkout your_chosen_branch
git branch -D master

Doing this will update the HEAD reference to point to your_chosen_branch. Otherwise you’ll have to do this manually:

git symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/your_chosen_branch