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I've been getting familiar with creating, merging and deleting branches. I like to know where I am so I don't commit work into the wrong branch. I use git branch -a to see which branches I have. I think the asterix * shows which branch I'm currently on. What does it mean when I get:
* (no branch)
master
origin/HEAD
Because when I $git checkout mybranch I expect to see
* mybranch
master
origin/HEAD
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"Not currently on any branch" means you have a detached head, i.e. your HEAD pointer is directly referencing a commit instead of symbolically pointing at the name of a branch. You can get into this situation by checking out a commit by SHA1, or when you're in the middle of a rebase, or when a merge fails.
just need to run git fetch , which will retrieve all branches and updates, and after that, run git checkout <branch> which will create a local copy of the branch because all branches are already loaded in your system.
To save changes committed in a detached HEAD state, you first need to create a new branch. Continuing from the scenario described above, you create a new branch called temp-branch . As soon as you make the branch and check out to it, the HEAD is no longer detached.
The git checkout man page does mention, for the branch name argument:
<branch>
Branch to checkout;
- if it refers to a branch (i.e., a name that, when prepended with "
refs/heads/", is a valid ref), then that branch is checked out.- Otherwise, if it refers to a valid commit, your
HEADbecomes "detached" and you are no longer on any branch.
So instead of having checked out a branch name, you must have checked out a tag name (valid commit), making your HEAD a detached one.
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