Swap a master and a feature branch

Question

We find ourselves in the situation where master has new feature work, and feature1 (which branched off master) is the stable master. How can we change things so that they "trade places"? I.e., feature1 becomes master, and master becomes newfeaturebranch?

I found a couple similar SO questions, but in those cases they no longer cared about the old master commits. Here, we want to preserve the current master as the new newfeaturebranch.

I've thought of one way to do this:

1. Create newfeaturebranch from the current master.
2. Revert/delete commits from master back to feature1's branching point.
3. Merge feature1 into master.
4. Delete branch feature1.

Answer 1

You can rename branches:

git branch -m master newfeaturebranch
git branch -m feature1 master

Answer 2

I started with poke's solution, but after pushing, the local branches were still tracking the old remote branches. To track the correct branches I just had to add the -u option for pushing.

git branch -m master newfeaturebranch
git branch -m feature1 master

git push -uf origin master
git push -u origin newfeaturebranch

It can be also done in two steps by first pushing and then adjusting the correct branch to track:

git push -f origin master
git push origin newfeaturebranch

git branch -u origin/master master
git branch -u origin/newfeaturebranch newfeaturebranch