When Git tells you it failed to push some refs

I received an unhelpful error while trying to push to a repository on Github today:

31 Responses to When Git tells you it failed to push some refs

  1. jpemberthy says:

    I ran thegit pull git@github.com:user/repository.gitAnd I’m getting the:”Automatic merge failed; fix conflicts and then commit the result.” 😦 and then, i can’t push >_<'Thanks in advance!

  2. jpemberthy says:

    Dammit! XD, I forgot the question man, How are u running the pull command? XD

  3. Edward Spencer says:

    You need to fix any conflicts, then commit, then push. Run git status to find all files that couldn’t be merged automatically, edit each of them to fix them, then git add . and git commit.You should then be able to git push (though you may have to git pull again first).If you’ve named your origin already you should just be able to run “git pull” without naming the source. If you’re on a branch you may have to type “git pull origin branchname”.

  4. jpemberthy says:

    Hi, thank you, I solved my problem setting the core.autocrlf to false!Thanks!

  5. graham o'regan says:

    hi – was struggling to find a simple explanation for manual merging conflicts, simple as it is your comment explained it best!

  6. skillet-thief says:

    Hey, thanks. Knowing this is sure a lot better than not knowing it!

  7. Randy J. Hunt says:

    A life saver. Thanks!

  8. Anonymous says:

    Thanks. I was totally confused.

  9. Anonymous says:

    good job!

  10. Anonymous says:

    It’s not that simple if you then get:You asked me to pull without telling me which branch youwant to merge with, and ‘branch.master.merge’ in

  11. Edward Spencer says:

    “if you then get:You asked me to pull without telling me which branch you want to merge with”If this happens to you, you need to specify the branch you want to pull. This will normally be master, as in:git pull origin master

  12. scottmotte says:

    Thanks.

  13. Harishankaran says:

    Thanks πŸ™‚ Short and sweet post πŸ™‚ Worked like magic πŸ™‚

  14. James says:

    These are my favorite blog entries. They come up in the top of a Google search, they are short and sweet, and they work.Rock on.

  15. Amos Wenger says:

    What more to say? I know I couldn't be disappointed this soon by git. Thanks a million =)

  16. skumar says:

    Hi, Thanks. Really helps me but wasted some time without knowing this.

  17. Anonymous says:

    Thank you.

  18. Jess says:

    very useful, thank you

  19. Jay says:

    When I do the “git pull origin master”, I come up short with this:

    fatal: Couldn’t find remote ref master

    How can that be?

  20. Chris says:

    Thanks for this post. No I think I get it.

  21. Bryce says:

    That’s a good quick fix for maybe 90% of the cases, but it can cause problems.

    Example: I did git-rebase to remove an unwanted commit, and when I tried to push it gave me the error. When I did git-pull to resolve it, the unwanted commit came back. I’m still looking for a solution that actually fixes the originating branch.

  22. Bryce says:

    I found a deeper explanation of branch conflicts, for those who need it.

    http://www.bonsai.com/wiki/howtos/vcs/git_remote_resolve/

  23. vaibhav says:

    Hi,

    When I try to push the changes I get the below error message. I’m able to do a clean pull and git status shows no conflicts. Any help will be appreciated. thanks in advance

    $ git status
    # On branch experimental
    nothing to commit (working directory clean)

    $ git push ssh://abc@localhost:29418/httpd-2.2.15 HEAD:refs/for/experimental
    abc@localhost’s password:
    Total 0 (delta 0), reused 0 (delta 0)
    To ssh://abc@localhost:29418/httpd-2.2.15
    ! [remote rejected] HEAD -> refs/for/experimental (no new changes)
    error: failed to push some refs to ‘ssh://abc@localhost:29418/httpd-2.2.15’

    Then i do:
    $ git pull ssh://abc@localhost:29418/httpd-2.2.15
    abc@localhost’s password:
    From ssh://abc@localhost:29418/httpd-2.2.15
    * branch HEAD -> FETCH_HEAD
    Already up-to-date.

    $ git status
    # On branch experimental
    nothing to commit (working directory clean)

    Thanks!!

  24. Thanks, I was having this error and had no clue how to solve it

  25. Sleeptillseven says:

    Hi

    saved me too. Thanks.

  26. Steven says:

    After pulling, my error disappeared ^_^
    Tnx!

  27. Jinesh says:

    Awesome solution …….Save my Time..

  28. Gareth says:

    Thanks a bunch !

  29. Ed Welsby says:

    Wow, small world – googled this exact same problem and came here then realized I (kind of) know you, I worked at Kohive for a while πŸ˜‰

    Sad thing is I’m just following the git newbie tutorial word and word and still hit the same error!

  30. kb9agt says:

    git ls-files #=> will just list all the files you have in the local repo.
    git status #=> will tell you which files are staged or not.
    git log –pretty=format:”%h – %an, %ar : %s” #=> will tell all the history of the repo.
    I can’t read the last line of this post because of the sidebar over it.
    But I’ve had these problems also with push and non-fast-forward.
    git tries to keep your history straight. If you have made any changes to your remote repo then this is where these problems may occur. Try to avoid that. But fear not, if you have the same files but updated them remotely, You may safely delete the local ones and a pull merge should work. But I’m not 100% sure so try some experimenting first.
    And by all means read some documentation.
    http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-remote.html

  31. error : src refspec test does not match any.
    fatal : The remote end hung up unexpectedly
    error : failed to push some refs to ‘git@github.com: {username}/{projectname}.git’

    Check the solution here….It might help someone

    http://www.codingdefined.com/2014/07/error-when-git-push-src-refspec-test.html

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: