I've taken over a repo and the previous dev had a branch that basically became the main branch. This branch is what they were pushing to production. The main branch doesn't have functioning code, and both branches are behind each other by quite a few commits.
The commits to the main branch are all completely unnecessary and the other branch should become the new main branch. What would be the best way to achieve this?
If I merge the other branch there will be a ton of conflicts to resolve. We were thinking of rebasing the branch onto main, but I think that will still have a similar problem.
Some more information, we have a local repo and the remote dev repo is on CodeCommit for use with an AWS server.
p.s. I'm a new dev and my boss used other VCS before so is also new to Git, so please be kind as we're new to this.
We've created a sandbox server and environment to test things with. My initial test was to delete the main branch and rename the other branch to main, but this resulted in an error from the remote repo on CodeCommit saying I cannot delete the current default branch. I tried changing the head of origin to the other branch but that didn't help either.
Rename the other branch "main".
Example. Presume your other branch is called
other:A branch in Git is merely a name — think of it as a string, a label, a mere piece of paper, attached to a commit. This code simply transfers the label from the last commit of what used to be
mainto the last commit of what used to beother.The commits constituting the old
main, no longer having a label, will be quietly forgotten and ultimately deleted automatically.