Git HEAD points to an old branch

Question

I have an repository in which the master branch was renamed to product . Things are fine except on one box where the code was cloned before this change. On that box HEAD still points to master:

* local-2
  remotes/origin/HEAD -> origin/master
  remotes/origin/local-1
  remotes/origin/product
  remotes/origin/local-2

It's certainly incorrect, but in practical application, it's also causing an issue with a deployment script. What would it take to reposition remotes/origin/HEAD so that it points to remotes/origin/product ?

Answer 1

These lines of output:

remotes/origin/HEAD -> origin/master
remotes/origin/product

say that the reference HEAD in your origin repo points to origin/master , but as you've said, origin/master has been renamed to origin/product . You'll need to do two things to correct this:

1. Make the reference HEAD on origin point to product .
2. Update local clones to have remotes/origin/HEAD point to origin/product .

For step #1, if your origin is hosted on GitHub, you simply set the default branch for origin to product . If it's not hosted on GitHub, you'll need access to the remote repo, from which you run the following:

git symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/product

For step #2, you'll need to run the following on each local clone to update what they have the remote repo HEAD configured to:

git symbolic-ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD refs/remotes/origin/product

See also:

1. Official Linux Kernel Git documentation for git symbolic-ref .
2. Git: Correct way to change Active Branch in a bare repository? .
3. How do I change a Git remote HEAD to point to something besides “master” .