“warning: updating the current branch” when pushing to a git repository

Posted by Wes in Version Control      2 comments

Mar
8

I pushed some changes after updating git on my server to git 1.6+ and now I get this:

$ git push origin master
...
warning: updating the current branch
warning: Updating the currently checked out branch may cause confusion,
warning: as the index and work tree do not reflect changes that are in HEAD.
warning: As a result, you may see the changes you just pushed into it
warning: reverted when you run 'git diff' over there, and you may want
warning: to run 'git reset --hard' before starting to work to recover.
warning:
warning: You can set 'receive.denyCurrentBranch' configuration variable to
warning: 'refuse' in the remote repository to forbid pushing into its
warning: current branch.
warning: To allow pushing into the current branch, you can set it to 'ignore';
warning: but this is not recommended unless you arranged to update its work
warning: tree to match what you pushed in some other way.
warning:
warning: To squelch this message, you can set it to 'warn'.
warning:
warning: Note that the default will change in a future version of git
warning: to refuse updating the current branch unless you have the
warning: configuration variable set to either 'ignore' or 'warn'.

Woah! After some research, this is because I didn’t set up my remote folder as “bare”. A non-bare repository has a working copy attached to it, and this warning is telling you that said working copy exists and is currently checked out to the branch you’re trying to push to.

This is bad, because if you were pushing to a co-worker’s machine, then when they go to commit or run a diff, things will go awry. In this case, I just didn’t set up the repository correctly (it was the first one I’d done!) so I wasn’t in danger of losing anything.

The fix is to use --bare:
git init --bare or git clone --bare