"Project description file" error in git?

Question

I've a small project that I want to share with a few others on a machine that we all have access to. I created a bare copy of the local repo with

git clone --bare --no-hardlinks path/to/.git/ repoToShare.git

I then moved repoToShare.git to the server.

I can check it out with the following:

git clone ssh://user@address/opt/gitroot/repoToShare.git/ test

I can then see everything in the local repo and make commits against that. When I try to push changes back to the remote server I get the following error.

*** Project description file hasn't been set
error: hooks/update exited with error code 1
error: hook declined to update refs/heads/master

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Git installs a bunch of pre-configured hooks in the hooks directory, out of the box they do not execute. If you happen to allow execute on them (Eg. chmod +x) then git will try to run them. The particular error pops up cause the default update is failing to run. To fix, delete the default update hook.

Does this link help? From the text:

A colleague of mine experienced a similar issue here where push was not working. You could not push to a local or remote public repository. He was getting a project description file hasn't been set error thrown by .git/hooks/update. This error was not happening for the same project on a linux or Windows box, and seemed to be happening only on Windows Vista. From my research hooks/update is not by default executed, but in windows vista the file permissions meant that it was. Deletion of hooks/update resolved these issues.