Change a Git remote HEAD to point to something besides master

There was almost the same question on GitHub a year ago.

The idea was to rename the master branch:

git branch -m master development
git branch -m published master
git push -f origin master 

Making master have what you want people to use, and do all other work in branches.

(a "git-symbolic-ref HEAD refs/head/published" would not be propagated to the remote repo)

This is similar to "How do I delete origin/master in Git".

As said in this thread: (emphasis mine)

"git clone" creates only a single local branch.
To do that, it looks at the HEAD ref of the remote repo, and creates a local branch with the same name as the remote branch referenced by it.

So to wrap that up, you have repo A and clone it:

• HEAD references refs/heads/master and that exists
  -> you get a local branch called master, starting from origin/master

• HEAD references refs/heads/anotherBranch and that exists
  -> you get a local branch called anotherBranch, starting from origin/anotherBranch

• HEAD references refs/heads/master and that doesn't exist
  -> "git clone" complains

Not sure if there's any way to directly modify the HEAD ref in a repo.

(which is the all point of your question, I know ;) )

Maybe the only way would be a "publication for the poor", where you:

 $ git-symbolic-ref HEAD refs/head/published
 $ git-update-server-info
 $ rsync -az .git/* server:/local_path_to/git/myRepo.git/

But that would involve write access to the server, which is not always possible.

As I explain in "Git: Correct way to change Active Branch in a bare repository?", git remote set-head wouldn't change anything on the remote repo.

It would only change the remote tracking branch stored locally in your local repo, in remotes/<name>/HEAD.

With Git 2.29 (Q4 2020), "git remote set-head^(man)" that failed still said something that hints the operation went through, which was misleading.

See commit 5a07c6c (17 Sep 2020) by Christian Schlack (cschlack).
^{(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit 39149df, 22 Sep 2020)}

remote: don't show success message when set-head fails

^{Signed-off-by: Christian Schlack}

Suppress the message 'origin/HEAD set to master' in case of an error.

$ git remote set-head origin -a
error: Not a valid ref: refs/remotes/origin/master
origin/HEAD set to master

Update: This only works for the local copy of the repository (the "client"). Please see others' comments below.

With a recent version of git (Feb 2014), the correct procedure would be:

git remote set-head $REMOTE_NAME $BRANCH

So for example, switching the head on remote origin to branch develop would be:

git remote set-head origin develop

Since you mention GitHub, to do it on their site simply go into your project, then...

admin > Default Branch > (choose something)

Done.