'You don't exist, go away' - what does this heroku error mean?

Question

So i'm pushing my code like usual and:

git push heroku master
You don't exist, go away!
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

Does anyone know what this is supposed to mean?

Answer 1

If you're pushing from OS X then it's probably this funky state OS X gets into where your user doesn't know its own identity -- you can confirm by typing the "id" command where you'll see your username is missing, or trying to sudo which won't work.

For some reason this seems to fix it:

dscacheutil -flushcache

Answer 2

Usually this:

The remote end hung up unexpectedly

Tells us about connection problem. But this:

You don't exist, go away!

Usually means that SSH client can't resolve your user name(LDAP error?) So, I thinks, it's a problem on your side, but to resolve it, there should be more information.

Answer 3

You might have nscd running. The thing caches passwd entries so that programs don't waste their time parsing /etc/passwd, calling NIS, LDAP, or whatever.

If the thing's database gets corrupted (unlikely, these days), or if it caches a negative answer (much more likely), it can drop arbitrary users from its cache. "sudo nscd -i passwd" should work.

If that doesn't fix it, kill nscd so that requests are no longer cached. Fix the problem. Then remove /var/cache/nscd/passwd and restart nscd.

This can happen if LDAP/NIS/whatever doesn't answer in time, and the non-answer is misinterpreted as "nonexistent entry" instead of "service problem".