Git Tip: git push ‘No refs in common and none specified’

@see http://www.thebuzzmedia.com/git-tip-git-push-no-refs-in-common-and-none-specified/

Git is a source-control tool used by software developers.

I recently switched from Subversion to Git and while things have been mostly smooth, there have been a few “WTF?” moments. I am going to try and blog the few beginner ones I ran into in hopes of helping anyone else.

Today I ran a ‘git push’ to shove my commits from my local repository back into the main remote repo, the result was this:

$ git push
No refs in common and none specified; doing nothing.
Perhaps you should specify a branch such as 'master'.
error: failed to push some refs to 'git@github.com:painfreepr/<repo>.git'

The odd bit is that I had just done this with a previous repo about 30 mins ago and it worked fine; this was a new repository I was setting up. As it turns out this is the result of originally cloning an empty repository (link, link) which is exactly what I did. I had created a new repo on GitHub and wanted to pull the repo down in IntelliJ to then add some files to it via the GUI instead of from the command line; so I had checked out the empty repo right after creating it.

The fix, fortunately, is dead easy:

$ git push origin master

Doing this should provide output like:

  
  

   
   $ git push origin master
  
  

  
  

   
   Counting objects: 568, done.
  
  

  
  

   
   Delta compression using up to 2 threads.
  
  

  
  

   
   Compressing objects: 100% (559/559), done.
  
  

  
  

   
   Writing objects: 100% (568/568), 2.28 MiB | 2.18 MiB/s, done.
  
  

  
  

   
   Total 568 (delta 205), reused 0 (delta 0)
  
  

  
  

   
   To git@github.com:painfreepr/<repo>.git
  
  

  
  

   
   * [new branch]      master -> master
  
  

It is my understanding that the core issue is that there are no files in commonbetween the original remote repo you cloned (empty) and the one on-disk (now full of files). Doing the git-push-origin-master shoves your repo up into the empty repository and gives you that common base again so you can do a ‘git push‘ without issue.

Happy Git’ing!