Reputation: 8437

Your configuration specifies to merge with the <branch name> from the remote, but no such ref was fetched.?

I am getting this error for pull:

Your configuration specifies to merge with the ref 'refs/heads/feature/Sprint4/ABC-123-Branch' from the remote, but no such ref was fetched.

This error is not coming for any other branch.
The special thing about this branch is that it is created from the previous commit of another branch.

My config file looks like:

[core]
    repositoryformatversion = 0
    filemode = false
    bare = false
    logallrefupdates = true
    symlinks = false
    ignorecase = true
    hideDotFiles = dotGitOnly
[remote "origin"]
    url = <url here>
    fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
[branch "master"]
    remote = origin
    merge = refs/heads/master
[branch "new-develop"]
    remote = origin
    merge = refs/heads/new-develop
[branch "feature/Sprint4/ABC-123-Branch"]
    remote = origin
    merge = refs/heads/feature/Sprint4/ABC-123-Branch

Upvotes: 594

Answers (30)

plazmen

Reputation: 71

I faced this issue when accidently set a url of a wrong repo. Try copying the repo URL and set it using the following command.

git remote set-url origin [url of your repo]

Upvotes: 0

Evidence Ekanem

Reputation: 141

for me, it was because when I merged develop to master, there was a config to delete the branch after a merge and that was why git pull wasn't working.

so to resolve this scenario, I had to go to the pull request and used the restore branch button to restore the branch.

Upvotes: 1

Ramakrishna Talla

Reputation: 1079

This was old question, in fact new git users still may experience the same issue

For example: 
 **you have repoA**
     remotes/origin/yourBranch1

 **you have repoB**
     remotes/origin/yourBranch1
     remotes/origin/yourBranch2

You may checkout at yourBranch1 under repoA
and thinking you are deleting remote yourBranch2 under repoB

then you would see below error
'Couldn't find remote ref'

Make sure you did checkout the branch which is under same repo, and is not the same branch that you intended to delete

Upvotes: 0

Slbox

Reputation: 13108

None of the answers here (including git fetch --prune origin) worked for me after a rebase. Here's what did work. Be aware that one of these commands will delete your local branch, so you'd better have it stored on your remote origin before running:

git checkout master // Get off the problem branch
git branch -d problemBranch // Delete the problem branch
git pull
git checkout problemBranch
git push -u
Now git pull works without complaint

This resulted in no extra merges nor any problems on any other machines using the repo.

Upvotes: 4

Florian

Reputation: 1089

It is also possible that the rights in the GitLab repository were simply missing when cloning the repository.

Upvotes: 0

Brijesh Ray

Reputation: 1263

When i was running 'git pull' command in my root project, following error was coming:

Command: git pull

Error: Your configuration specifies to merge with the ref 'refs/heads/main' from the remote, but no such ref was fetched.

Soultion: I simply deleted .git folder and reinitialize .git(created .git folder again) by running git init command in my root project folder and it worked.

Upvotes: -1

user9944111

Reputation: 11

I was in the branch that was merged and deleted in the remote. Checking out to a branch that exists and then pulling helped me.

Upvotes: 0

DanielBell99

Reputation: 1927

Informal, but deleting my local project and recloning worked.

I was safe doing so as I had never developed a branch for merge.

Upvotes: 0

OppfinnarJocke

Reputation: 1048

I just now experienced the problem of "no such ref was fetched", and none of the above suggestions helped. The way I solved it was to change in my local config

remote.origin.fetch=+refs/heads/master:refs/remotes/origin/master

remote.origin.fetch=+refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

I have no idea why that worked, but it did. After this change, I could pull and received what I expected.

If I change it back, I again get the "no such ref was fetched" when trying to pull. So this was definitely the fix (not flunky internet, or case differences, or full drive, or deleted remote branch, or default branch not named "master", etc).

Upvotes: 3

Extreme

Reputation: 3429

This can also happen if you/someone renamed the branch. So follow these steps (if you know that branch name is renamed) Assuming earlier branch name as wrong-branch-name and someone renamed it to correct-branch-name So.

git checkout correct-branch-name

git pull (you'll see this "Your configuration specifies..")

git branch --unset-upstream

git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/correct-branch-name

for older git versions git push --set-upstream origin correct-branch-name

git pull (you'll not get the earlier message )

Upvotes: 254

fabpico

Reputation: 2917

Happened to me when installing packages with yarn. An own dependency had a renaming of branch main into master. Only updating upstream on the dependency did not fix it, I additionally had to clean the yarn cache.

Project A renamed the main branch (main -> master). Project A is a dependency of Project B.
yarn install on Project B <-- causes error
Push updated upstream on Project A
yarn install on Project B <-- causes error
yarn cache clean
yarn install on Project B <-- works now

Upvotes: 0

torek

Reputation: 487725

What this means

Your upstream—the remote you call origin—no longer has, or maybe never had (it's impossible to tell from this information alone) a branch named feature/Sprint4/ABC-123-Branch. There's one particularly common reason for that: someone (probably not you, or you'd remember) deleted the branch in that other Git repository.

What to do

This depends on what you want. See the discussion section below. You can:

create or re-create the branch on the remote, or
delete your local branch, or
anything else you can think of.

Discussion

You must be running git pull (if you were running git merge you would get a different error message or no error message at all).

When you run git fetch, your Git contacts another Git, based on the url line under the [remote "origin"] section of your configuration. That Git runs a command (upload-pack) that, among other things, sends your Git a list of all branches. You can use git ls-remote to see how this works (try it, it is educational). Here is a snippet of what I get when running this on a Git repository for git itself:

$ git ls-remote origin
From [url]
bbc61680168542cf6fd3ae637bde395c73b76f0f    HEAD
60115f54bda3a127ed3cc8ffc6ab6c771cbceb1b    refs/heads/maint
bbc61680168542cf6fd3ae637bde395c73b76f0f    refs/heads/master
5ace31314f460db9aef2f1e2e1bd58016b1541f1    refs/heads/next
9e085c5399f8c1883cc8cdf175b107a4959d8fa6    refs/heads/pu
dd9985bd6dca5602cb461c4b4987466fa2f31638    refs/heads/todo
[snip]

The refs/heads/ entries list all of the branches that exist on the remote,¹ along with the corresponding commit IDs (for refs/tags/ entries the IDs may point to tag objects rather than commits).

Your Git takes each of these branch names and changes it according to the fetch line(s) in that same remote section. In this case, your Git replaces refs/heads/master with refs/remotes/origin/master, for instance. Your Git does this with every branch name that comes across.

It also records the original names in the special file FETCH_HEAD (you can see this file if you peek into your own .git directory). This file saves the fetched names and IDs.

The git pull command is meant as a convenience short-cut: it runs git fetch on the appropriate remote, and then git merge (or, if so instructed, git rebase) with whatever arguments are needed to merge (or rebase) as directed by the [branch ...] section. In this case, your [branch "feature/Sprint4/ABC-123-Branch"] section says to fetch from origin, then merge with whatever ID was found under the name refs/heads/feature/Sprint4/ABC-123-Branch.

Since nothing was found under that name, git pull complains and stops.

If you run this as two separate steps, git fetch and then git merge (or git rebase), your Git would look at your cached remotes/origin/ remote-tracking branches to see what to merge with or rebase onto. If there was such a branch at one time, you may still have the remote-tracking branch. In this case, you would not get an error message. If there was never such a branch, or if you have run git fetch with --prune (which removes dead remote-tracking branches), so that you have no corresponding remote-tracking branch, you would get a complaint, but it would refer to origin/feature/Sprint4/ABC-123-Branch instead.

In either case, we can conclude that feature/Sprint4/ABC-123-Branch does not exist now on the remote named origin.

It probably did exist at one time, and you probably created your local branch from the remote-tracking branch. If so, you probably still have the remote-tracking branch. You might investigate to see who removed the branch from the remote, and why, or you might just push something to re-create it, or delete your remote-tracking branch and/or your local branch.

¹Well, all that it is going to admit to, at least. But unless they have specifically hidden some refs, the list includes everything.

Edit, Jul 2020: There's a new fetch protocol that can avoid listing everything, and only list names that your Git says it's looking for. This can help with repositories that have huge numbers of branches and/or tags. However, if your Git is interested in all possible names, you'll still get all the names here.

Upvotes: 370

JohnnyUtah

Reputation: 545

I've found this error occurs frequently when pulling updates from a repo whose default master branch has been renamed to main. Encountered this a lot after the 2020 trend of renaming master branch to main branch.

So if you had previously cloned a repo with the default master branch and that branch has since been renamed to main, one way to fix is by simply pointing your upstream from master to main:

git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/main master

If that command succeeds, you should see a message like this:

Branch 'master' set up to track remote branch 'main' from 'origin'.

You can then rename your local branch from master to main (to keep consistent with the remote branch name) with git branch -m master main

Upvotes: 6

J. Gwinner

Reputation: 1565

I have gotten this exact error, but none of the suggested answers (possibly the case sensitivity) was the issue. They probably are for 99% of the issues out there, but that still leaves 1%.

It turned out, mixing WSL / Linux file shares and Windows base directories was the problem. I was running WSL (Ubuntu 20.04) and has a repo that was accessed / edited from Windows, but the code was running on WSL. I may have done some git status checks from the WSL side.

The repo existed, the case was correct, the internet worked fine, none of the branches were removed, etc. Yet I also got the error Your configuration specifies to merge with the from the remote, but no such ref was fetched.?

What my fix was, was to make sure all of the items were pushed / all changes recorded, then I just removed the directory and did a 'git clone' again from Windows. Then the 'git checkout' worked fine. I realize this isn't really an answer, but it did work.

I was doing Linux development where a code library automates certain operations, including 'git clone'; however, I normally do my code pushes from Windows. My guess is that the .git folder is not cross-platform compatible (not that I had any expectation it was). Yet, it usually works. Is it a bug? Debateable.

git will also occasionally try too hard to be nice and munge line endings; that's a different problem (and bordering on religion. I'm an Agnostic. Yes, there's a setting.)

Upvotes: 0

IKo

Reputation: 5756

In my case the repo was temporary unavailable (under maintenance).

Upvotes: 0

Andrew Koper

Reputation: 7199

The branch's pull request in the Github repo was approved, it was merged into the dev branch and doesn't exist on origin any more.

Upvotes: 0

bareMetal

Reputation: 551

Check for case sensitivity

In my case, my branch name (remote) had uppercase letters, for example: BranchName. Accidently, I created a branch branchname (all lower case) on my local machine and set upstream to the same, and this error appeared.

Solution: I deleted the local repository, cloned it again, and checked out to BranchName

Upvotes: 3

Michael

Reputation: 475

Rename the local branch

git branch -m temp

Display all branches

git branch -a

Check out the specific remote branch

git checkout main

Delete the temp branch

git branch -d temp

Upvotes: 1

R Zhang

Reputation: 339

In my case the master cannot be fetched in a new project.

And it worked after I put this in the command line,

git config --global http.sslVerify false

ref: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucketserverkb/can-t-access-bitbucket-server-with-git-issuer-certificate-is-invalid-779171808.html

Upvotes: 0

Christoffer Sørensen

Reputation: 51

I had a similar issue with master/main branch. In my case I did not have enough free space on my harddisk. After freeing up some space, it worked.

I assume its because the files /.git needs some space to edit its file. For example the file: 'refs/heads/feature/Sprint4/ABC-123-Branch'

Upvotes: 5

topkek

Reputation: 169

In my case, I renamed the branch on Github which in return told me to execute the following commands:

The default branch has been renamed!

main is now named <new_name>

If you have a local clone, you can update it by running:

git branch -m main <new_name>
git fetch origin
git branch -u origin/<new_name> <new_name>
git remote set-head origin -a

Upvotes: 2

nealmcb

Reputation: 13451

This is a more common error now as many projects are moving their master branch to another name like main, primary, default, root, reference, latest, etc, as discussed at Github plans to replace racially insensitive terms like ‘master’ and ‘whitelist’.

To fix it, first find out what the project is now using, which you can find via their github, gitlab or other git server.

Then do this to capture the current configuration:

$ git branch -vv
...
* master  968695b [origin/master] Track which contest a ballot was sampled for (#629)
...

Find the line describing the master branch, and note whether the remote repo is called origin, upstream or whatever.

Then using that information, change the branch name to the new one, e.g. if it says you're currently tracking origin/master, substitute main:

git branch master --set-upstream-to origin/main

You can also rename your own branch to avoid future confusion:

git branch -m main

Upvotes: 32

Gendos-ua

Reputation: 383

You can easily link your local branch with remote one by running:

git checkout <your-local-branch>
git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/<correct-remote-branch> <your-local-branch>
git pull

Upvotes: 11

emi-le

Reputation: 796

I just got the same error, when I didn't use the correct case. I could checkout out 'integration'. Git told me to perform a git pull to update my branch. I did that, but received the mentioned error. The correct branch name is 'Integration' with a capital 'I'. When I checked out that branch and pulled, it worked without problem.

Upvotes: 1

Guilherme Campos Hazan

Reputation: 1031

In my case, i had deleted the original branch from which my current branch derived from. So in the .git/config file i had:

[branch "simil2.1.12"]
    remote = origin
    merge = refs/heads/simil2.0.5
    rebase = false

the simil2.0.5 was deleted. I replaced it with the same branch name:

[branch "simil2.1.12"]
    remote = origin
    merge = refs/heads/simil2.1.12
    rebase = false

and it worked

Upvotes: 3

Monalisa Das

Reputation: 757

I was facing the same issue where my current branch was dev and I was checking out to MR branch and doing git pull thereafter. An easy workaround that I took was I created a new folder for MR Branch and did git pull there followed by git clone.

So basically I maintained different folders for pushing code to different branch.

Upvotes: 0

Stéphane

Reputation: 20340

I kept running into this issue. In my case, @Jerreck's comment about case differences in the branch names was the cause of this error. Some Windows tools aren't aware of case sensitivity.

To turn off case-sensitivity in git, run this command:

git config --global core.ignorecase true

Note that this will impact more than branch names. For example, if you have "Foo.h" and "foo.h" in the same directory (not a great idea when building software for Windows) then I suspect you cannot turn off case sensitivity.

Upvotes: 3

Angelo Mendes

Reputation: 978

You can edit the ~/.gitconfig file in your home folder. This is where all --global settings are saved.

Or, use git config --global --unset-all remote.origin.url and after run git fetch with repository url.

Upvotes: 1

user7550381

Reputation: 21

I just got exactly this error when doing "git pull" when my disk was full. Created some space and it all started working fine again.

Upvotes: 2

Abhishake Gupta

Reputation: 3170

Just check if someone deleted the branch at remote.

Upvotes: 1

Your configuration specifies to merge with the &lt;branch name&gt; from the remote, but no such ref was fetched.?

Answers (30)

What this means

What to do

Discussion

Check for case sensitivity

Related Questions

Your configuration specifies to merge with the <branch name> from the remote, but no such ref was fetched.?