How can I change which commit master points to in git?

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

• stash your uncommitted: git stash
• create a new branch: git branch new_branch
• reset master to origin/master: git reset --hard origin/master
• checkout the new branch again: git checkout new_branch
• 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):

• checkout a new branch: git checkout -b new_branch master
• create a 'new' master branch and point it to origin/master's commit: git branch -f master origin/master

Answer 2

$ git checkout master $ git reset --hard <commit-id-for-master-to-sit-at> 

for example try this

$ mkdir example; cd example $ git init $ vi testFile.txt (now add "test commit 1" to line 1 of file) $ git add * $ git commit (add message "(+) 1st commit" to git commit) $ vi testFile.txt (now add "test commit 2" to line 1 of file) $ git add * $ git commit (add message "(+) 2nd commit" to git commit) $ vi testFile.txt (now add "test commit 3" to line 1 of file) $ git add * $ git commit (add message "(+) 3rd commit" to git commit) $ git tag final_head $ git reset --hard HEAD~1 

this example shows moving the master to a different commit. Note here that the tag allows us to save the old master, in case :)