My git branch is showing 'origin/master' a

Question

I recently merged a branch I was working on with the 'master' branch. I must have (still kind of a git n00b) done something when pushing or pulling that created both an origin/master and an origin/HEAD branches. Unfortunately, I didn't keep a record of what commands I ran that did this. Currently, my team has a bunch of code in their master copies that I'm not getting when I check out the project (even if I clone to a new location).

Here's a screenshot of what Sourcetree is showing:

I really need to get this resolved so I can keep working so any help will be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

It is just a pointer to master, a symbolic link if you wish. You can safely delete it by doing the following in a terminal (or git bash/cygwin for windows users):

1. navigate to your repository
2. execute: git remote set-head origin -d

now it should be gone:

$ git branch -r
origin/master

Answer 2

The branches you see that begin with origin/ are so-called "remote-tracking braches". They tell you the position of the branches in the repository origin the last time git fetched from that repository.

It's nothing to worry about - this is actually helpful information. If you think those branch positions are out of date, you can run:

git fetch origin

... to update them.

In any repository, HEAD is special kind of ref (a "symref") that represents the current branch (or current commit, if you're not on a particular branch).

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You can see in the diagram that your master branch is actually one commit ahead of origin/master, so if your colleagues have been pushing to master in origin and you ran git fetch origin (or something equivalent) recently, you already have all their work. However, they will be missing out on your commit until you push that.

You say:

Currently, my team has a bunch of code in their master copies that I'm not getting when I check out the project (even if I clone to a new location).

If that's the case, they're probably pushing to a different branch, a different repository, or they haven't pushed their work at all.