Why is `git push --force-with-lease` failing with "rejected ... stale info" even when my local repo is up to date with remote?

Question

I'm trying to force push a rebase of a feature branch to a remote repository. To be a bit safer, I'm trying to use --force-with-lease to make sure no other changes have happened in the branch since I last fetched it.

This is failing for reasons I don't understand:

$ git branch * my-branch   master  $ git push --force-with-lease origin my-branch -u To gitlab.com:example/my-project.git  ! [rejected]        my-branch -> my-branch (stale info) error: failed to push some refs to '[email protected]:example/my-project.git' 

I tried a fetch to see if my local cache had somehow gotten out of sync:

$ git fetch  $ git push --force-with-lease origin my-branch -u To gitlab.com:example/my-project.git  ! [rejected]        my-branch -> my-branch (stale info) error: failed to push some refs to '[email protected]:example/my-project.git' 

I tried simplifying the push command a bit:

$ git push --force-with-lease To gitlab.com:example/my-project.git  ! [rejected]        my-branch -> my-branch (stale info) error: failed to push some refs to '[email protected]:example/my-project.git' 

I tried limiting the check to my branch:

$ git push --force-with-lease=my-branch:origin/my-branch To gitlab.com:example/my-project.git  ! [rejected]        my-branch -> my-branch (stale info) error: failed to push some refs to '[email protected]:example/my-project.git' 

As you can see, it fails the same way every time.

Why is my push failing, and how do I fix it?

Answer 1

In this case it turned out that the problem was that the remote branch had been deleted, but there was still a copy of it in my local repo. Fetch doesn't delete local copies by default, which is why it had no effect.

Adding the --prune option to my initial git pull (before doing my rebase) corrects this problem.