How do I delete origin/master in Git

Question

I cannot remove origin/master from my server. No idea why.

The error message is the following

remote: error: By default, deleting the current branch is denied, because the next
remote: error: 'git clone' won't result in any file checked out, causing confusion.
remote: error: 
remote: error: You can set 'receive.denyDeleteCurrent' configuration variable to
remote: error: 'warn' or 'ignore' in the remote repository to allow deleting the
remote: error: current branch, with or without a warning message.
remote: error: 
remote: error: To squelch this message, you can set it to 'refuse'.
remote: error: refusing to delete the current branch: refs/heads/master
To [email protected]:/export/home/a/elabshare/git/ID-check.git
 ! [remote rejected] master (deletion of the current branch prohibited)
error: failed to push some refs to '[email protected]:/export/home/a/elabshare/git/ID-check.git'

No, I am not using Github.

Answer 1

Fun fact: even remote, bare repositories are on a branch. You're getting rejected because you're trying to delete the branch that your origin has currently "checked out".

If you have direct, filesystem-access to the repo:

1. You can just open up a shell to the bare repo directory and use good old git branch to see what branch origin is currently on (if any; see below). To change it to another branch, you have to use git symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/<another_branch>.

2. In some unusual scenarios, including when the default branch is renamed, a bare repo has no current, "checked out," default branch. In such a case, git branch | grep '^*' run from the bare repo directory will print nothing (the default branch has a * to the left of the default-branch name), and you can run the above git symbolic-ref ... command to select a default branch. (Also: you can run git branch <new_branch> to create a new one, if needed, but a default/current branch has to first be selected.)

If you are using a service like Github or Gitorious, you're going to have to use the UI the tool provides you to make the change (see this answer for how to do that in common tools).

Answer 2

In lieu of actually removing master from the server, you can replace it like this:

git push origin otherbranch:master -f

That will replace master with the contents of otherbranch, but it'll still be called master on the remote. And then you can check out master as master in your local.