How to resolve git s not something we can merge error

Question

I just encountered a problem when merging a branch into master in git  First  I got the branch name by running git ls-remote  Let s call that branch  branch-name   I then ran git merge branch-name command and got the following result   fatal  branch-name - not something we can merge   How do I resolve this error

User · Answer

For me  the problem was the  double quotation marks  into merge message  So when I removed the double mark  all magically worked  I hope to help someone   Sorry for my poor English

User · Answer

It may happen because that branch is not on your local  before merging use  git fetch origin

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In my opinion i had missed to map my local branch with remote repo  i did below and it worked fine   git checkout master git remote add origin https   github com yourrepo project git git push -u origin master git pull git merge myBranch1FromMain

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For me the problem occured when I tried this   git merge -s ours --no-commit --allow-unrelated-histories  lt remote name gt  develop   So actually I should have written master instead of develop because master was the branch name of Subtree not my actual branch

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If the string containing the reference is produced by another Git command  or any other shell command for that matter   make sure that it doesn t contain a return carriage at the end  You will have to strip it before passing the string to  git merge    Note that it s pretty obvious when this happens  because the error message in on 2 lines   merge  26d8e04b29925ea5b59cb50501ab5a14dd35f0f9  - not something we can merge

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We got this error because we had a comma     in the branch name  We deleted the local branch  then re-checked it under a new name without the comma  We were able to merge it successfully

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I suggest checking if you are able to switch to the branch that you are trying to merge with   I got this error even though the branch I wanted to merge with was in local repository and there were no spelling errors   I ignored my local changes so that I could switch to the branch  Stash or commit can also be preferred   After this I switched back to the initial branch  and the merge was successful

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For posterity  Like AxeEffect said    if you have no typos check to see if you have ridiculous characters in your local branch name  like commas or apostrophes  Exactly that happened to me just now

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I had a work tree with master and an another branch checked out in two different work folders   PS C  rhipheusADO Build gt  git worktree list C  rhipheusADO Build         7d32e6e  vyas-cr-core  C  rhipheusADO Build-master  91d418c  master   PS C  rhipheusADO Build gt  cd    Build-master   PS C  rhipheusADO Build-master gt  git merge 7d32e6e  Or any other intermediary commits Updating 91d418c  7d32e6e Fast-forward  Pipeline CR-MultiPool azure-pipelines-auc yml   5    --  1 file changed  3 insertions     2 deletions -   PS C  rhipheusADO Build-master gt  git ls-remote From https   myorg visualstudio com HelloWorldApp  git Build 53060bac18f9d4e7c619e5170c436e6049b63f25        HEAD 7d32e6ec76d5a5271caebc2555d5a3a84b703954        refs heads vyas-cr-core   PS C  rhipheusADO Build-master gt  git merge 7d32e6ec76d5a5271caebc2555d5a3a84b703954 Already up-to-date  PS C  rhipheusADO Build gt   git push Total 0  delta 0   reused 0  delta 0  To https   myorg visualstudio com HelloWorldApp  git Build    91d418c  7d32e6e  master - gt  master   If you need to just merge the latest commit   git merge origin vyas-cr-core  git push   And is same as what I ve always done   git checkout master   This is needed if you re not using worktrees git pull origin vyas-cr-core git push

User · Answer

I had the same problem    I am a complete beginner In my case it happened cause I was trying to do  git merge random branch file txt My problem was solved when I retired the file txt and let just the branch name  lol  kkfdskfskdfs git merge random branch worked pretty well

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In My case  the Problem was in Branch Name  My new branch name contains brackets  Once I renamed it and remove brackets  It s sorted

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I had this issue as well  The branch looked like  username master  which seemed to confuse git as it looked like a remote address I defined  For me using this  git merge origin username master   worked perfectly fine

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This error suggest that the branch from where you want to merge changes  i e  in you case branch-name  is not present in you local  so you should checkout the branch and fetch the local changes  Checkout to your master branch and fetch  then follow the below steps   git checkout branch-name git pull git checkout new-branch-name git merge branch-name

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This answer is not related to the above question  but I faced a similar issue  and maybe this will be useful to someone  I am trying to merge my feature branch to master like below    git merge fix-load  for this got the following error message   merge  fix-load - not something we can merge  I looked into above all solutions  but not none of the worked  Finally  I realized the issue cause is a spelling mistake on my branch name  actually  the merge branch name is fix-loads

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As shown in How does  quot not something we can merge quot  arise   this error can arise from a typo in the branch name because you are trying to pull a branch that doesn t exist   If that is not the problem  as in my case   it is likely that you don t have a local copy of the branch that you want to merge  Git requires local knowledge of both branches in order to merge those branches  You can resolve this by checking out the branch to merge and then going back to the branch you want to merge into   git checkout branch-name git checkout master git merge branch-name   This should work  but if you receive an error saying  error  pathspec  remote-name branch-name  did not match any file s  known to git    you need to fetch the remote  probably  but not necessarily   origin   before checking out the branch   git fetch remote-name

User · Answer

I got this error when I did a git merge BRANCH NAME  some commit message  - I d forgotten to add the -m flag for the commit message  so it thought that the branch name included the comment

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It s a silly suggestion  but make sure there is no typo in the branch name

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This may sounds weird  but remember to setup your git email and name   git config --global user email  MY EMAIL COM  git config --global user name  FIRST NAME LAST NAME

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The branch which you are tryin to merge may not be identified by you git at present so perform  git branch  and see if the branch which you want to merge exists are not  if not then perform  git pull  and now if you do git branch  the branch will be visible now   and now you perform git merge  lt BranchName gt

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When pulling from a remote upstream  git fetch --all did the trick for me   git remote add upstream  url to the original repo  git checkout  branch to be updated  git fetch --all git merge upstream  branch to be updated    In other cases  I found the  Not something we can merge  error will also happen if the remote  origin  upstream  branch does not exist  This might seem obvious  but you might find yourself doing git merge origin develop on a repo that only has master

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You might also encounter this error if you are not using origin keyword and the branch isn t one of your own  git checkout  lt to-branch gt   git merge origin  lt from-branch gt

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The below method works for me every time   git checkout master git pull git checkout branch-name-to-be-merged git pull git checkout branch-name git pull git merge branch-name-to-be-merged

User · Answer

You are getting this error because the branch you want to merge doesn t exist on your local repository    So  first checkout the brach you want to merge into master branch by the following command    git checkout branch name to merge   After this try to merge it with master branch by the following command    git merge branch name to merge

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I had the same problem  I fixed it using the command below  git checkout main git fetch git checkout branch name git fetch git checkout main git fetch git merge branch name

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git rebase the-branch-to-be-merged I solved the problem using this git command  but rebase is only suited for some cases

[git] How to resolve git's "not something we can merge" error

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