I created a repo on GitHub and only have a master branch so far. My local working copy is completely up to date with the remote/origin master on GitHub.
I now want to create a development branch on GitHub so that other people on my team can start pushing changes to development (instead of directly to master) and submit PRs, request code reviews, etc.
So I tried creating a new development branch locally and pushing it:
git checkout -b development
git push origin development:master
But git just says Everything up-to-date. So I ask:
If I'm current with master, how do I just create a remote development branch that contains an exact copy of master?
When you do
$ git push origin development:master
What's actually happening is git is taking <local>:<remote> and updating <remote> to whatever the <local> branch is.
Since you executed git checkout -b development from master, your local development has all the commits master does; hence it shows as everything is up to date.
You can just do
$ git checkout -b development
$ git push origin development
to push the new branch