Which characters are illegal within a git remote name?

Question

Which characters are illegal within a git remote name ?

I didn't found it the git documentation.

Answer 1

I didn't find anything in the documentation, either. So let's take a look at the source.

When you try to add a remote with an invalid name or rename a remote to an invalid name, you'll get an error message like

fatal: 'foo@{bar' is not a valid remote name

So let's search the Git source for that.

We see that Git goes about this a bit backwards: It tests (here for adding, here for renaming (mv)) whether refs/heads/test:refs/remotes/<the remote name>/test is a valid fetch reference, as determined by valid_fetch_refspec(<the ref name>), which in turn calls parse_refspec_internal(...).

The latter does many checks that will most of the time pass anyway due to the majority of the input being given in our case, but it will also call check_refname_format(...) on the right-hand side (i.e. the refs/remotes/<the remote name>/test part if the splitting at : went alright).

I guess this means that the characters and character sequences disallowed for branches and tags are also forbidden for remote short names.