git Warning: remote HEAD refers to nonexistent ref, unable to checkout

git gitosis
srboisvert picture srboisvert · Dec 25, 2009 · Viewed 49.1k times · Source

I'm trying to setup gitosis according to the instructions here.

It works fine from my remote machine so the server seems to be setup fine but I'd also like to be able to do development on my gitosis server machine from a different user account (not the git user created in the gitosis setup).

I've copied the key and modified the gitosis.conf so that the other user account has access but when I try to clone it seems to work except at the end it says: 

git Warning: remote HEAD refers to nonexistent ref, unable to checkout

and I end up with an empty directory except for .git

I've google for this a bit but have no real insight into what the problem is

Answer

srboisvert picture srboisvert · Dec 26, 2009

I found out what was going wrong. The problem was that I wasn't paying attention to the warnings when I was pushing to my gitosis server so I didn't realize that I wasn't pushing a particular branch. I had assumed it would just push the current but that isn't the case until you set:

git config push.default current

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