got 'fatal: branch 'master' does not exist' in git

Question

using git for a while, it's very powerful and beautiful..

but also got some confused about it:

it should under branch master after I init a git repo, isn't it?

but git branch -a, i got nothing man.
and I got fatal: branch 'master' does not exist when I try to set upstream for my branch.

users@debian MINGW64 ~/Desktop/taste
$ git init
Initialized empty Git repository in C:/Users/users/Desktop/taste/.git/

users@debian MINGW64 ~/Desktop/taste (master)
$ git remote add origin [email protected]:greedev/Test.git

users@debian MINGW64 ~/Desktop/taste (master)
$ git branch -u origin/master
fatal: branch 'master' does not exist

users@debian MINGW64 ~/Desktop/taste (master)
$ git branch -a

users@debian MINGW64 ~/Desktop/taste (master)
$ git fetch
The authenticity of host 'gitee.com (120.55.226.24)' can't be established.
ECDSA key fingerprint is SHA256:FQGC9Kn/eye1W8icdBgrQp+KkGYoFgbVr17bmjey0Wc.
Are you sure you want to continue connecting (yes/no)? yes
Warning: Permanently added 'gitee.com,120.55.226.24' (ECDSA) to the list of know                n hosts.
remote: Counting objects: 7, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (6/6), done.
remote: Total 7 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
Unpacking objects: 100% (7/7), done.
From gitee.com:greedev/Test
* [new branch]      master     -> origin/master

users@debian MINGW64 ~/Desktop/taste (master)
$ git branch -a
  remotes/origin/master

users@debian MINGW64 ~/Desktop/taste (master)
$ git branch -u origin/master
fatal: branch 'master' does not exist

Answer 1

TL;DR

You can git checkout master at this point.

Longer description (but still not that long)

You are doing this the hard way.

In the future, instead of:

mkdir repo
cd repo
git init
git remote add origin <url>
git fetch origin
git checkout master

you can simply run:

git clone <url> repo

since the six commands above are pretty much what git clone does.

After the first three steps—creating a new, totally-empty repository—you have a repository that is in a peculiar state: it has no commits, so it has no branches. At the same time, it does have a current branch, which is master.

In other words, the current branch is a branch that does not exist.

This state is unusual, but normal. If you run git checkout --orphan newbranch, you put your Git repository into that same state:¹ on a branch that does not exist. The branch gets created once there is a commit hash to store under the branch name.

Whenever you run git checkout <name> and there is no branch named <name>, Git checks to see if there is exactly one remote-tracking branch such as origin/<name>. If so, Git creates a new branch named <name> that points to the same commit as origin/<name> and that has origin/<name> as its upstream.

Since this last step—git checkout master when master does not actually exist yet—is the final step of git clone, git clone will also create a new branch master that tracks the remote-tracking branch origin/master.

---

¹Note that you retain the current index / staging-area content. This is true for the new empty repository as well, but since it's a new empty repository, the index / staging-area is also empty, and "retaining the empty set" does not feel much like retainment.

Answer 2

After you run git init, the master you see is not completely created. It doesn't exist as it hasn't pointed to any commit yet. I once read that it was designed. But I think it's a puzzling bug. If you run git branch, it returns nothing.

After you run git fetch, a following git checkout master does the job. It is equivalent to:

git branch master origin/master
git checkout master
git branch -u origin/master