Troubleshooting git

Table of contents

  1. Author identity unknown
  2. fatal: Need to specify how to reconcile divergent branches
  3. fatal: loose object [ … ] is corrupt
  4. fatal: update_ref failed for ref ‘ORIG_HEAD’

Author identity unknown 

Author identity unknown

 *** Please tell me who you are.

Run
    git config --global user.email "you@example.com"
    git config --global user.ename "Your Name"

to set your account's default identity.
Omit --global to set the identity only to this repository.

Git commits must be signed with a name and email, this error states that it cannot find a name or email configured to sign a commit.

Notice how this message includes a solution within its text, just like many Git errors.

Set your name and email like it said:

$ git config --global user.email "slug@ucsc.edu"
$ git config --global user.name "Sammy Slug"

You can also configure the identity of a repository separately:

$ git config --global user.email mine@personal.com
$ git config --global user.name sluggo_wuggo

# Within a repository
$ git config --local user.email slug@ucsc.edu
$ git config --local user.name “Sammy Slug”

In most terminal operations, quotation marks are optional with single-tokens, but is necessary when tokens are space separated like a "FirstName Last Name"

fatal: Need to specify how to reconcile divergent branches

Upon a git pull, you may get:

hint: You have divergent branches and need to specify how to reconcile them.
hint: You can do so by running one of the following commands sometime before
hint: your next pull:
hint: 
hint:   git config pull.rebase false  # merge
hint:   git config pull.rebase true   # rebase
hint:   git config pull.ff only       # fast-forward only
hint: 
hint: You can replace "git config" with "git config --global" to set a default
hint: preference for all repositories. You can also pass --rebase, --no-rebase,
hint: or --ff-only on the command line to override the configured default per
hint: invocation.
fatal: Need to specify how to reconcile divergent branches

The error is saying there are divergent branches, or inconsistent branch history, and Git needs to know how to deal with them upon a pull. The easiest method is to merge the two branches into one, so enter:

git config pull.rebase false
git pull # try the pull again

fatal: loose object [ … ] is corrupt

Upon any Git command, you might get some error like:

error: object file .git/objects/... is empty
error: object file .git/objects/... is empty
fatal: loose object ... (stored in .git/objects/...) is corrupt

This usually happens with improper shutdowns of your virtual machine.

Navigate to the root of your repository (where .git is located)and do:1

find .git/objects/ -size 0 -exec rm -f {} \;
git fetch origin

fatal: update_ref failed for ref ‘ORIG_HEAD’

Upon every push/pull from a remote called origin, a file called ORIGIN_HEAD is updated. If this file is corrupted, you may get a message similiar to:

fatal: update_ref failed for ref 'ORIG_HEAD': ... reference broken

To resolve this, you can remove the faulty file and then try your git push or git pull again.2 The file ORIGIN_HEAD will be remade.

# cd to root of your repo
rm .git/ORIGIN_HEAD

  1. loose object fix from Stack Overflow ↩

  2. ORIGIN_head fix from Stack Overflow ↩