Git: "Error: refusing to create funny ref 'HEAD' remotely" for initial push

git egit
Casebash picture Casebash · Aug 13, 2012 · Viewed 9.6k times · Source

I am attempting an initial push of my Git repository from Egit (Eclipse Git) to GitHub. Unfortunately I am getting the following error:

error: refusing to create funny ref 'HEAD' remotely

I set both the source and destination ref to 'HEAD'

What does this error message mean?

Answer

Casebash picture Casebash · Aug 13, 2012

I fixed this by selecting master (refs/heads/master) as the source ref instead. Egit then automatically set the destination ref to master as well. I suppose that this command tells git to create the master branch, while selecting HEAD either tries to create a branch called HEAD or tries to push to the current (non-existing) remote HEAD.

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