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copied!<h2>Mid-2017 answer</h2> <p>Creating a new completely empty commit with no side effects is probably best done by using Git’s plumbing directly. Doing it that way avoids any side effects: no touching the working copy or the index, no temporary branches to clean up, etc. So:</p> <ol> <li><p>To create a commit, we need a directory tree for it, so we create an empty one first:</p> <pre><code>tree=`git hash-object -wt tree --stdin < /dev/null` </code></pre></li> <li><p>Now we can wrap a commit around it:</p> <pre><code>commit=`git commit-tree -m 'root commit' $tree` </code></pre></li> <li><p>And now we can rebase onto that:</p> <pre><code>git rebase --onto $commit --root master </code></pre></li> </ol> <p>And that’s it. You can rearrange that whole thing into a one-liner if you know your shell well enough.</p> <p>(N.B.: in practice I’d now use <code>filter-branch</code>. Will edit that in later.)</p> <hr> <h2>Historical answer (referenced by other answers)</h2> <p>Here’s a cleaner implementation of the same solution, in that it works without the need to create an extra repository, futz around with remotes, and correct a detached head:</p> <pre><code># first you need a new empty branch; let's call it `newroot` git checkout --orphan newroot git rm -rf . # then you apply the same steps git commit --allow-empty -m 'root commit' git rebase --onto newroot --root master git branch -d newroot </code></pre> <p>Voila, you’ve ended up on <code>master</code> with its history rewritten to include an empty root commit.</p> <hr> <p>NB.: on old versions of Git that lack the <code>--orphan</code> switch to <code>checkout</code>, you need the plumbing to create an empty branch:</p> <pre><code>git symbolic-ref HEAD refs/heads/newroot git rm --cached -r . git clean -f -d </code></pre>

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