Git Push Branch Other Than Master [duplicate]

Question

I've looked for a solid answer on this, and haven't really found anything relevant. We are working with a remote git repository where we are pushing branch that is not master to the remote repo. For example:

git checkout -b new_branch
git add --all .
git commit -m "changes"
git push remote new_branch

However, when we try to clone from that bare remote repository, we get the error:

git clone /path/to/repo.git 

warning: remote HEAD refers to nonexistent ref, unable to checkout.

I'm not sure why HEAD is detached and not pointing to the last commit on new_branch? How can we clone this remote repository?

Answer 1

The warning: remote HEAD refers to nonexistent ref, unable to checkout. means that the remote (bare) repository contains branch reference in the file HEAD that does not match any published branch in the same repository.

Note that the warning only means that git didn't do checkout. The cloned repository is otherwise just fine. Just do git branch -a to see possible branches and git checkout the-branch-you-want to workaround the issue.

This usually happens because the default contents for that file is ref: refs/heads/master which says that if somebody is going to clone this repository, they should by default clone the branch refs/heads/master. By default Git will create local branch without the refs/heads/ prefix (that is, master by default). Try git help symbolic-ref for more information.

The problem with this situation is that Git does not provide a method for modifying remote symbolic refs so either you use something the Git hosting provider has implemented (e.g. Settings - Default branch in GitHub if you have admin rights) or you have to use branch name master as the default branch (because that's the default value for that symbolic ref).

One way to hit this issue is to create a new remote bare repo with no commits and then do git push name-of-the-remote my-special-branch-name which will result in bare repository containing a single branch my-special-branch-name but the HEAD symbolic ref still contains the default value pointing to master. As a result, you'll get the aforementioned warning.

see : this post