Ken's Techno Tidbits

I’d been working away on the Bixo project, and pushing changes to GitHub without any problems.

Then I made the mistake of pulling in a new branch, versus creating the branch.

% git checkout origin cfetcher
% git pull

This merged the remote branch into my local master branch, with bizarre results. After a few attempts at trying to back it out, I blew away my local directory and just re-cloned the remote cfetcher branch, since that’s where I’d be working for the next few days. Unfortunately when I cloned it, I did:

% git clone git://github.com/emi/bixo.git

That created a clone using the GitHub “Public Clone URL”, not the “Your Clone URL”, which is git@github.com:emi/bixo.git. Oops.

Everything worked, though, until I wanted to push back some changes:

% git push
fatal: protocol error: expected sha/ref, got '
*********'

You can't push to git://github.com/user/repo.git
Use git@github.com:user/repo.git

*********'

Expected sha/ref? Though the error message had all of the info I needed, just not in a format that was obvious. For example, a good message would have said:

You can't push to git://github.com/emi/bixo.git
Update the url for the "origin" remote in your .git/config file to use git@github.com:emi/bixo.git

Eventually the Supercharged git-daemon blog post at GitHub cleared things up for me. I edited the URL entry in my .git/config file, and all is (once again) well.

[remote "origin"]
    url = git@github.com:emi/bixo.git
    fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 at 11:55 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.