Question

I’ve faced strange problem with my git repo. In process of cloning it looses all it’s heads except master. Isn’t head is just a file-reference to the commit id? Or it should be registered somewhere else to be cloned?

It looks exactly as William Pursell described:

 cd a
 $ git branch
   master
   * test
 $ cd ..
 $ git clone a b
 Initialized empty Git repository in /private/tmp/b/.git/
 $ cd b
 $ git branch
   * master

Answer 1

Perhaps you haven’t pushed all of your branches to your remote repository. Cloning a remote repository should automatically include all remote branches.

Note that remote branches do not automatically become local branches. You can use the git branch -a command to see all the branches you have. Example:

$ git branch -a
* master
  remotes/origin/next
  remotes/origin/HEAD -> origin/master
  remotes/origin/master

With that, we can turn the “next” remote branch into a local one with git checkout -b and specify the remote branch as a starting point:

$ git co -b next origin/next
Branch next set up to track remote branch next from origin.
Switched to a new branch 'next'

And now you’re all set for working on “next”.