CODEWITHSUNDEEP
gitgit-non-bare-repository
Roman
Roman

Reputation: 131228

Why is it not a commit and a branch cannot be created from it?

I need to work with an intricate configuration of repositories. I have 5 of them:

  1. A remote central repository on machine 1.
  2. My local repository on my notebook (machine 2).
  3. A bare repository on machine 3.
  4. A repository on machine 3.
  5. A repository on machine 4 where we do code review.

So, my understanding that it works this way:

  1. On my laptop (machine 2) I clone / pull from the central repository located on machine 1.
  2. I push the local repo to the machine 3 (using the bare repository as a "intermediate").

Now I did some changes on the machine 3 and I want to push these changes to machine 4. Here are the instructions that I need to follow:

  1. On machine 3 do all work in your test-branch, commit.
  2. Push to your bare repo on machine 3: git push origin test-branch
  3. On your laptop: fetch new commits from the machine-3 repo: git fetch machine3
  4. Check out your branch from machine 3: git checkout -b test-branch machine-3/test-branch
  5. Fetch commits from machine-4: git fetch origin
  6. git rebase origin/master
  7. git push origin HEAD:refs/for/master

I have problems with step 4. I get the following error:

fatal: 'machine3/test-branch' is not a commit and a branch 'test-branch' cannot be created from it

ADDED

When I execute

git rev-parse machine3/test-branch

On my laptop (machine 2) I get:

machine3/test-branch

fatal: ambiguous argument 'machine3/test-branch': unknown revision or path not in the working tree.

Use '--' to separate paths from revisions, like this:
'git <command> [<revision>...] -- [<file>...]'

Upvotes: 109

Views: 235930

Answers (19)

Wilmer Rond&#243;n Brice&#241;o
Wilmer Rond&#243;n Brice&#241;o

Reputation: 11

General Solution:

git fetch origin <base_branch>

git checkout -b <new_brach> origin/<base_branch>

Your issue might be solved in this way:

git fetch machine-3 test-branch

git checkout -b local-test-branch machine-3/test-branch

Upvotes: -1

Smile
Smile

Reputation: 4088

I generally create the branches via UI on gitlab/github and then switch to it in local.

I was running this command

git fetch origin
git checkout --track origin/my-branch

And I got the same error fatal: 'origin/my-branch' is not a commit and a branch 'my-branch' cannot be created from it

It turns out, my-branch didn't exist on the remote repository. I had mistakenly created it on another repo via UI.

Upvotes: -1

Monobina Saha
Monobina Saha

Reputation: 1

I faced the same error and the fix was as simple as creating teh branch in two steps:

  1. git checkout the existing branch from where I want to create my new branch. e.g. git checkout dev This brings you to the dev branch.
  2. create the new branch from dev branch while sitting on the dev branch e.g. git checkout -b <new_feature_branch> dev

Upvotes: 0

VonC
VonC

Reputation: 1328292

The solution from J.D. Mallen involves git fetch --all

Starting with VSCode 1.53 (Jan. 2021), you will have (issue 110811 and PR 111090):

Changing autofetch to a string config which has "current", "all" and "off".

This allows users to fetch from all remotes instead of just their origin.
For developers working on a Fork, this should make extensions work more intuitively.

So if you set the VSCode setting git.autofetch to "all", you won't even have to type git fetch --all.

Charlie Parker adds in the comments:

What about git pull?

That supposes you are on a current branch with a remote tracking branch already set up.

The original question does not have such a branch in place, which means git pull would not know what to merge from fetched branches.

Upvotes: -1

Mad Bernard
Mad Bernard

Reputation: 372

I just encountered this when I used the "copy" tool on GitHub next to the branch name of a coworker's PR. His branch was named like coworker/ticket-number and git checkout --track coworker/ticket-number was what came out of the paste.

When I went back to my usual workflow, using git branch -r | grep ticket-number I found that the actual branch name I needed to use was origin/coworker/ticket-number.

Upvotes: 0

Kurtis Lininger
Kurtis Lininger

Reputation: 69

For those who found this searching for an answer to fatal: 'origin/remote-branch-name' is not a commit and a branch 'local-branch-name' cannot be created from it, another possibility we just found is the remote branch has been merged already :embarrassed:

Upvotes: 0

tree em
tree em

Reputation: 21771

Check your git config in .git folder, and validate this content

[core]
    repositoryformatversion = 0
    fileMode = false
    bare = false
    logallrefupdates = true
    ignorecase = true
    precomposeunicode = true
[remote "origin"]
    url = https://github.com/ABC/project0001.git
    fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
[branch "main"]
    remote = origin
    merge = refs/heads/main
[pull]
    ff = no
[branch "develop"]
    remote = origin
    merge = refs/heads/develop

[remote "origin"] <-- this section

Upvotes: 0

Matteus Barbosa
Matteus Barbosa

Reputation: 2743

The branch does not exist on the remote origin specified. Double check: You might be trying to pull oranges from a grapes tree.

Upvotes: 0

SeanMC
SeanMC

Reputation: 2366

My issues was I had a space in my new branch name

Issue:

git checkout -b my-new-branch name

instead of

git checkout -b my-new-branch-name

Upvotes: -1

life_of_webdeveloper
life_of_webdeveloper

Reputation: 1

I had the problem where I git checkout name-branch and it was created but when i check the branch with git branch nothing happens after hours of trying to figure out I tried to run the command git push GitHub-URL name-branch and it pushes the commit directly to the branch hope this helps

Upvotes: 0

Vladimir Nikotin
Vladimir Nikotin

Reputation: 146

I found this question troubleshooting simpler problem: I recieved same error trying to create a lobal branch from remote. I resolved it by creating branch from commit hash:

git ls-remote origin remote-branch
returned
<hash>  refs/heads/remote-branch

git checkout -b local-branch <hash>

Upvotes: 7

Luciano
Luciano

Reputation: 1072

We were having this exact error in a Windows machine running gitbash on a folder synced with google drive.

It was caused by having the feature "Enable experimental built-in file system monitor" enabled.

After uninstalling and reinstalling gitbash with this feature disabled it was fixed.

enter image description here

Upvotes: 1

Jeroen Vermeulen
Jeroen Vermeulen

Reputation: 2491

We had this error:

fatal: 'origin/newbranch' is not a commit and a branch 'newbranch' cannot be created from it

because we did a minimalistic clone using:

git  clone  --depth 1  --branch 'oldbranch'  --single-branch  '[email protected]:user/repo.git'

For us the minimalistic fix was:

git  remote  set-branches  --add  'origin'  'newbranch'
git  fetch  'origin'
git  checkout  --track  'origin/newbranch'

Assuming the remote is called 'origin' and the remote branch is called 'newbranch'.

Upvotes: 89

Vahid Najafi
Vahid Najafi

Reputation: 5263

For this issue:

fatal: 'machine3/test-branch' is not a commit and a branch 'test-branch' cannot be created from it

For me, I should have checked out to test-branch first, then it worked fine and created a new branch from test-branch.

Upvotes: 0

Okpo
Okpo

Reputation: 417

I used git workflow in visual studio code as shown in the below diagram to solve mine:

create a feature branch using git on vscode

Upvotes: -2

Player1
Player1

Reputation: 3205

I managed to fix this with this settings, just update the config with this command

git config -e --global

and add this config.

[remote "origin"]
    url = https://git.example.com/example.git (you can omit this URL)
    fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*

and then you can git fetch --all

Upvotes: 20

J.D. Mallen
J.D. Mallen

Reputation: 4689

For those who found this searching for an answer to fatal: 'origin/remote-branch-name' is not a commit and a branch 'local-branch-name' cannot be created from it, you may also want to try this first:

git fetch --all

If you run git checkout -b local-branch-name origin/remote-branch-name without fetching first, you can run into that error.

The reason it says "is not a commit" rather than something clearer like "branch doesn't exist" is because git takes the argument where you specified origin/remote-branch-name and tries to resolve it to a commit hash. You can use tag names and commit hashes as an argument here, too. If they fail, it generates the same error. If git can't resolve the branch you provide to a specific commit, it's usually because it doesn't have the freshest list of remote branches. git fetch --all fixes that scenario.

The --all flag is included in case you have multiple remotes (e.g. origin, buildserver, joespc, etc.), because git fetch by itself defaults to your first remote-- usually origin. You can also run fetch against a specific remote; e.g., git fetch buildserver will only fetch all the branches from the buildserver remote.

To list all your remotes, run the command git remote -v. You can omit the --all flag from git fetch if you only see one remote name (e.g. origin) in the results.

Upvotes: 211

ttfreeman
ttfreeman

Reputation: 5543

If you're checking out a branch from a tag (like git checkout -b XXXX v0.1.1) , you can try git fetch --tags first.

Upvotes: 4

Roman
Roman

Reputation: 131228

The question is complex / convolute, the answer is simple. There was a mismatch between the alias and machine3. The alias for the remote that has been used, was not for machine3. The machine3 had another alias.

Upvotes: 0

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