Creating a new empty branch for a new project

You can create a branch as an orphan:

git checkout --orphan <branchname>

This will create a new branch with no parents. Then, you can clear the working directory with:

git rm --cached -r .

and add the documentation files, commit them and push them up to github.

A pull or fetch will always update the local information about all the remote branches. If you only want to pull/fetch the information for a single remote branch, you need to specify it.

The correct answer is to create an orphan branch. I explain how to do this in detail on my blog._{(Archived link)}

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Before starting, upgrade to the latest version of GIT. To make sure you’re running the latest version, run

which git

If it spits out an old version, you may need to augment your PATH with the folder containing the version you just installed.

Ok, we’re ready. After doing a cd into the folder containing your git checkout, create an orphan branch. For this example, I’ll name the branch “mybranch”.

git checkout --orphan mybranch

Delete everything in the orphan branch

git rm -rf .

Make some changes

vi README.txt

Add and commit the changes

git add README.txt
git commit -m "Adding readme file"

That’s it. If you run

git log

you’ll notice that the commit history starts from scratch. To switch back to your master branch, just run

git checkout master

You can return to the orphan branch by running

git checkout mybranch