Question

In git, I’ve been making commits onto the master branch, when really I should have been working on a feature branch. I want to change this so that master is back to where it started, and what was on master is now on a new branch. Basically, my commit history looks like this:

A -- B -- C -- D -- E
          |         |
          |       master
     origin/master

And I want it to look like this:

        master
          |
A -- B -- C -- D -- E
          |         |
          |       new_branch
     origin/master

How can I change where master points?

Answer 1

1. Stash your uncommitted changes: git stash
2. Create a new branch: git branch new_branch
3. Reset master to origin/master: git reset --hard origin/master
4. Check out the new branch again: git checkout new_branch
5. Unstash your changes: git stash pop

Stash/unstash is not necessary if your working tree is clean. Just make sure there are no changes in your working tree, because those will be removed when you reset –hard

---

Another possibility (faster, and without the need to stash and reset):

1. Check out a new branch: git checkout -b new_branch master
2. Create a ‘new’ master branch and point it to origin/master’s commit: git branch -f master origin/master