Visual Studio Git error: "The index is locked. This might be due to a concurrent or crashed process."

Question

Received an error in Git for Visual Studio:

The index is locked. This might be due to a concurrent or crashed process.

Answer 1

Another process may still be running in the background. In my case, I had a command (I keep wanting to say DOS, lol) prompt open with a Git command that paused on Should I try again? (y/n) and I didn't realize. It had created an index.lock file in the .git folder, locking the index file (same folder) in the process. If this is not the case for you, then open the task manager and look for another Visual Studio process (devenv.exe) stuck in memory, or some other Git tool. If you don't see anything that could be locking it, you could just try to delete the index.lock file directly (perhaps shut down Visual Studio first). If it won't delete, then another process still has a lock on it. You might have to restart the system if you can't find it, and make sure on reboot the file is deleted (which you may have to do manually if the process locking it was terminated forcefully).

Answer 2

For me resetting and deleting changes of my local branch did not solve the issue. I found a work around for the "The index is locked" issue. This works after you have successfully committed your local changes to the remote repository.

1. Exit all the IDEs (including Visual Studio) which you're working on.

2. Then go to .git folder in your project directory and delete the index.lock file

3. Then open Visual Studio and open Team Explorer window. If you have any local brances created, go to Home tab and click on Branches (under Project heading).

4. Right click on the active local branch, go to reset, click on Reset and Delete Changes.

5. Then try to Checkout the relevant remote branch.

6. But if step 5 fails, then go to Home tab and click on Changes (under Project heading). Then right click on all the sub-folders and files under the main project folder which the changes had been done and select delete. Then you'll be able to checkout the relevant remote branch.

Cheers :)

Update: As James Wilkins says, this is caused by "orphaned index.lock" file. Explanation can be found here, provided by Microsoft DevOps.