Create a new empty branch in Git

new empty git branch.md

$ git checkout --orphan NEWBRANCH
$ git rm -rf .

--orphan creates a new branch, but it starts without any commit. After running the above command you are on a new branch "NEWBRANCH", and the first commit you create from this state will start a new history without any ancestry.

You can then start adding files and commit them and they will live in their own branch. If you take a look at the log, you will see that it is isolated from the original log.

@Ogollah I know I'm late to the party but, yes you can merge master into the new banch. You can even fast forward the new branch to master's state (which will basically move the new branch's ref next to master's)

Legend! Thank you.

I created a branch initial before creating master. I wanted to squash merge a single commit into master but couldn't create a PR and if I created a branch it would have just contained all of the commits I wanted to squash. I resolved this with:

git checkout --orphan master
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"
git push --set-upstream origin master

Then updated the Default Branch to master in Settings -> Branches.

A complete example from a 2021 perspective starts with renaming master -> main. Then:

$ git checkout --orphan NEWBRANCH
$ git rm -rf .
$ touch .gitignore && git add .gitignore
$ git commit -m "Initialize with .gitignore"
$ git checkout main
$ git reset --hard NEWBRANCH

how to create new empty branch in repository plz update command

deploy_empty_branch(){
  commit_id=$(git commit-tree -m "New empty $1 branch" 4b825dc642cb6eb9a060e54bf8d69288fbee4904)
  git push origin ${commit_id}:refs/heads/$1
}

deploy_empty_branch gh-pages

https://www.edwardthomson.com/blog/pushing_an_empty_branch.html

instead of creating a new empty branch this wiped all my project files and weeks of work are now gone :)

instead of creating a new empty branch this wiped all my project files and weeks of work are now gone :)

Yeah, because you nuked everything with rm -rf without doing a git checkout before.

instead of creating a new empty branch this wiped all my project files and weeks of work are now gone :)

Don't experiment with obscure git commands on repositories you do not have backed up, a single remote or even a local copy would've saved you the headache