Renaming Git Default Branch to Main Fails

I recently created a new project and noticed that my git init created the default branch as master. I wanted to rename this to main.

So I typed the simple git branch -m master main but then I got this error:

error: refname refs/heads/master not found
fatal: Branch rename failed

I was confused, but then it hit me… I hadn’t actually committed anything yet so my branch didn’t actually exist! As soon as I committed something, my branch rename worked fine.

Hope this helps someone else.