Git unable to resolve references when pushing

(a worthwhile tl;dr from @NeTeInStEiN:

The nuclear option is rm -rf .git/refs/remotes/origin, and that's what it took here)

edit: I've run across part of this behavior in one of my own repos, I can get git to reproduce the f-e-r failure without the rm .git/refs/remotes/origin/master hack:

  • clone a repo
  • delete the origin's primary branch (the one its HEAD's attached to)
  • run git fetch --prune in the clone

The fetch will produce a dangling-ref warning, and git for-each-ref will fail with a familiar message:

~/sandbox/20/buddy$ git fetch --prune
From /home/jthill/sandbox/20/source/.
 x [deleted]         (none)     -> origin/master
   (refs/remotes/origin/HEAD has become dangling)
~/sandbox/20/buddy$ git f-e-r
fatal: missing object 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000 for refs/remotes/origin/HEAD

but that doesn't break the push, I've tried with every setting of push.default, nor does it break git update-ref -d.

However, googling the push message did get me this:

I had just rebooted from a BSOD the other day [...] then git push. And that’s when I got a complaint about “Unable to resolve reference refs/remotes/origin/master…”. [...] So, I opened up the master file and it was full of spaces! Well, that’s no good. In order to fix it, I did this: [your rm, and then git fetch]

See comments above for the blow-by-blow, tl;dr is, because these were remote refs, which git fetch completely refreshes, and because the damage was such that for-each-ref and git update-ref failed to work at all, the nuclear option rm -rf refs/remotes/origin; git fetch was guaranteed to restore the remote properly.

In other circumstances, if there'd been no easy way to restore the damaged refs or for curiosity, find .git/refs/remotes/origin -type f to check for locks or using reflogs (those files are in .git/logs) to recover content would have helped but it wasn't necessary here. I think I missed a bet by not doing the find first, *.lock files from a kill -9ed earlier command look likely here, but I suspected an ambiguous ref and f-e-r is my first step for those.


Remove the following directory from .git folder -> .git/refs/remotes/origin

This will remove all the remote branches and you need to fetch them again using -> git fetch. This should fix the issue.

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