How to solve git merge error "Swap file .MERGE_MSG.swp already exists"

Question

When I pull:

E325: ATTENTION
Found a swap file by the name "~/Documents/Sites/recipegenerator/.git/.MERGE_MSG.swp"
          owned by: username   dated: Wed Dec 14 12:28:45 2016
         file name: ~username/Documents/Sites/recipegenerator/.git/MERGE_MSG
          modified: YES
         user name: username   host name: Users-MacBook-Pro.local
        process ID: 33747
While opening file "/Users/larsvanurk/Documents/Sites/recipegenerator/.git/MERGE_MSG"
             dated: Thu Dec 22 14:06:17 2016
      NEWER than swap file!

(1) Another program may be editing the same file.
    If this is the case, be careful not to end up with two
    different instances of the same file when making changes.
    Quit, or continue with caution.

(2) An edit session for this file crashed.
    If this is the case, use ":recover" or "vim -r /Users/username/Documents/Sites/recipegenerator/.git/MERGE_MSG"
    to recover the changes (see ":help recovery").
    If you did this already, delete the swap file "/Users/username/Documents/Sites/recipegenerator/.git/.MERGE_MSG.swp"
    to avoid this message.

Swap file "~/Documents/Sites/recipegenerator/.git/.MERGE_MSG.swp" already exists!

When I push:

To  https://github.com/nickname/recipegenerator.git
 ! [rejected]        master -> master (fetch first)
error: failed to push some refs to 'https://github.com/nickname/recipegenerator.git'
hint: Updates were rejected because the remote contains work that you do
hint: not have locally. This is usually caused by another repository pushing
hint: to the same ref. You may want to first integrate the remote changes
hint: (e.g., 'git pull ...') before pushing again.
hint: See the 'Note about fast-forwards' in 'git push --help' for details.

Please help :C Idk what to do. I can't push or pull. I tried pretty much everything I could think of. I also tried: git merge --abort. The thing is when I do that, I can't seem to find my conflict that I should resolve.

Answer 1

It's a message from VIM which apparently you are using as the text editor in git. Have you tried reading and following these two (1) (2) points? One of them will be probably true, and will let you solve this issue.

First of all, check that MERGE_MSG file (not MERGE_MSG.swp), and see if it exists and what's inside. Most likely it's trash or a temporary file that can be safely deleted. Judging from the name, it's probably the file name used as a temporary text editing area for merge commit messages.

Then, since you use VIM, when VIM starts, it tries to create a swap file for its own internal needs. The error message says it's ~/Documents/Sites/recipegenerator/.git/.MERGE_MSG.swp. Often, you can simply delete such swap files, especially if they are old or unexpected. However, if recently some merge-commit-message-editing session has crashed and if you had a lot of creative text you don't want to lose - then don't delete it and recover that swap instead, as described in (2) in the error message.

However, since you don't know what is going on and you haven't said anything about losing some text you wrote, and since it's probably just a MERGE_MSG that was auto-generated anyways, I suppose you can:

git merge --abort
rm ~/Documents/Sites/recipegenerator/.git/.MERGE_MSG.swp

and try what you were doing once again.

Also, it's good to check the hint mentioned in (1) in error message. Check with ps or whatever else for any open VIM sessions that could be currently editing that MERGE_MSG. If you spot any, then, well, get to them and either finish editing, or make them quit (escape, :q!, enter) (vim will cleanup swaps on quitting), or terminate them (kill them, but then you need to remove swap files manually).