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copied!<p>Yes, this is normal for new bare (and non-bare) repositories.</p> <h3>Explanation</h3> <p><code>HEAD</code> is what Git calls a <em>symbolic reference</em>—a reference to another reference.</p> <p>In non-bare repositories, <code>HEAD</code> normally indicates which branch is currently checked out. A new commit will cause the branch named by <code>HEAD</code> to be advanced to refer to the new commit. When <code>HEAD</code> refers to a commit object directly instead of a branch, it's considered to be <em>detached</em>, meaning further commits will not cause a branch reference to be advanced to refer to the new commits (dangerous because checking out a different commit or branch will render the new commits unreachable by any existing reference, making them hard to find and subject to garbage collection).</p> <p>In bare repositories, <code>HEAD</code> indicates the repository's default branch, so that in a clone of the repository <code>git checkout origin</code> is equivalent to <code>git checkout origin/master</code> if <code>master</code> is the default branch (see <code>git help rev-parse</code> for details).</p> <p>When Git initializes a new repository, it initializes <code>HEAD</code> to refer to <code>refs/heads/master</code> (in other words, <code>HEAD</code> points to the <code>master</code> branch by default). However, it does not create a branch named <code>master</code> because there are no commits in the repository for <code>master</code> to point to yet.</p> <p>So until you either create a <code>master</code> branch or change <code>HEAD</code> to point to a branch that does exist, you'll get that error when you run a command that looks at <code>HEAD</code> (such as <code>git log</code> or <code>git show</code> without any arguments).</p> <p>You can still use commands that don't examine <code>HEAD</code>. For example:</p> <pre><code>git log some_branch_that_exists </code></pre> <h3>Fix</h3> <p>To get rid of the error message, you can do one of the following:</p> <ul> <li><p>Change <code>HEAD</code> to point to a branch that does exist:</p> <pre><code>git symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/some_other_branch </code></pre></li> <li>Push a new <code>master</code> branch into the repository from somewhere else</li> <li><p>Create a new <code>master</code> branch locally:</p> <pre><code>git branch master some_existing_commit </code></pre></li> </ul> <h3>Visualization</h3> <p>To visualize everything in the repository, I use something like this:</p> <pre><code>git log --graph --oneline --date-order --decorate --color --all </code></pre> <p>Note that the above command will work even if <code>HEAD</code> is pointing to a non-existent branch.</p>

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