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I have had the issue currently where I needed to remove my .git/index.lock file. Without too much hesitation I am guessing that this file somehow locks processes that can access the git repo. However I can't seem to find a good description/documentation for what this file actually does and why you get the problem described for instance in this question(link).
What does the index.lock actually do, and what causes the problem that people are having related to this file?
It would be very nice to know so I can prevent this issue in the future.
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When you perform a Git command that edits the index, Git creates a new index. lock file, writes the changes, and then renames the file. The index. lock file indicates to other Git processes that the repository is locked for editing.
If you don't have any Git processes running, you can delete the index. lock file and try the Git operation again.
If you want to completely remove the file from the index, you will have to use the “git rm” command with the “–cached” option. In order to make sure that your file was correctly removed from the staging area, use the “git ls-files” command to list files that belong to the index.
Git does not provide any locking functionality, since it is decentralized. However, if you host your code on GitLab Enterprise Edition Premium, you can use the web interface to lock individual files or folders, achieving exactly what you want to do.
I have found this from https://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/technical/api-lockfile.html. This tells you what .git/index.lock does.
- Mutual exclusion. When we write out a new index file, first we create a new file
$GIT_DIR/index.lock, write the new contents into it, and rename it to the final destination$GIT_DIR/index. We try to create the$GIT_DIR/index.lockfile with O_EXCL so that we can notice and fail when somebody else is already trying to update the index file.- Automatic cruft removal. After we create the "lock" file, we may decide to
die(), and we would want to make sure that we remove the file that has not been committed to its final destination. This is done by remembering the lockfiles we created in a linked list and cleaning them up from anatexit(3)handler. Outstanding lockfiles are also removed when the program dies on a signal.
I guess the reason of the problem you said is malfunction of the Automatic cruft removal on some OS. I have used Git on Linux since a few years ago, but not experienced such kind of problem yet.
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