Why am I getting the message fatal This operation must be run in a work tree

Question

Just installed git on Windows  I set the GIT DIR variable to be c  git  and verified that this environment variable is maintained by cygwin  i e  echo  GIT DIR is what it should be    I went to the folder that I wanted to create the git repository for  let s say c  www  and then ran   git init git add     Then I get the error   fatal  This operation must be run in a work tree   I m not sure what went wrong  but the c  git directory has a config file that says    core      repositoryformatversion   0     filemode   false     bare   true     symlinks   false     ignorecase   true   I m pretty sure this shouldn t be bare and that s our problem

User · Accepted Answer

The direct reason for the error is that yes, it's impossible to use git-add with a bare repository. A bare repository, by definition, has no work tree. git-add takes files from the work tree and adds them to the index, in preparation for committing.

You may need to put a bit of thought into your setup here, though. GIT_DIR is the repository directory used for all git commands. Are you really trying to create a single repository for everything you track, maybe things all over your system? A git repository by nature tracks the contents of a single directory. You'll need to set GIT_WORK_TREE to a path containing everything you want to track, and then you'll need a .gitignore to block out everything you're not interested in tracking.

Maybe you're trying to create a repository which will track just c:\www? Then you should put it in c:\www (don't set GIT_DIR). This is the normal usage of git, with the repository in the .git directory of the top-level directory of your "module".

Unless you have a really good reason, I'd recommend sticking with the way git likes to work. If you have several things to track, you probably want several repositories!

User · Answer

If nothing else seems to work  double-check the path in git config core worktree  If that path doesn t point to your working directory  you may need to update it   The way I got this error was that I created a Git repository on a network drive  It worked fine on one computer but returned this error on another  It turned out that I had the drive mapped to a Windows drive letter on the computer where I created it  but not on the other computer  and Git saved the path to the work tree as the mapped path and not the UNC path

User · Answer

Same issue i got  i did following steps     git init git add   git commit -m inital setup  git push -f origin master   then it work starts working

User · Answer

Explicitly setting the GIT DIR environment variable forces git to use the given directory as the git repository  It is never needed during normal use   In your example  because have specified a GIT DIR and it isn t named  git  the leading dot is important  and you haven t provided a --work-tree option or set the GIT WORK TREE environment variable  that you want a bare repository when you said git init   Because a bare repository has no working tree a large selection of commands don t make sense with a bare repository  git add is just one   Is there a particular reason that you need to use a non-standard location for your git repository  rather than in a  git subfolder under the working tree root  While it s possible to arrange this it tends to be more work and more liable to user mistakes

User · Answer

This should solve it    git config --unset core bare

User · Answer

If none of the above usual ways help you  look at the call trace underneath this error message   fatal  This operation         and locate the script and line which is raising the actual error  Once you locate that error   call  disable it and see if the operation you are trying completes even with some warnings messages - ignore them for now  If so  finally after completing it might mention the part of the operation that was not completed successfully  Now  address this part separately as applicable   Relating above logic to my case  I was getting this error message  fatal  This operation        when I was trying to get the Android-x86 code with repo sync        and the call trace showed raise GitError  cannot initialize work tree   as the error   call causing the above error message   fatal           So  after commenting that GitError   in  repo repo project py  repo sync       continued and finally indicated error for three projects that were not properly synced  I just deleted their   git folders from their relevant paths in the Android-x86 source tree locally and ran repo sync       again and tasted success

User · Answer

In my case  I was in the same folder as   git  file for my repo  I had to go one directory level up  it solved it

User · Answer

If an existing  non-bare  checkout begins giving this error  check your  git config file  if core bare is true  remove that config line

User · Answer

Create a bare GIT repository  A small rant  git is unable to create a normal bare repository by itself  Stupid git indeed   To be precise  it is not possible to clone empty repositories  So an empty repository is a useless repository  Indeed  you normally create an empty repository and immediately fill it   git init git add     However  git add is not possible when you create a bare repository   git --bare init git add     gives an error  fatal  This operation must be run in a work tree    You can t check it out either   Initialized empty Git repository in  home user myrepos  git  fatal  http   repository example org projects myrepos git info refs not found  did you run git update-server-info on the server   git --bare init git update-server-info   this creates the info refs file chown -R  lt user gt   lt group gt      make sure others can update the repository   The solution is to create another repository elsewhere  add a file in that repository and  push it to the bare repository   mkdir temp  cd temp git init touch  gitignore git add  gitignore git commit -m  Initial commit  git push  url or path of bare repository  master cd     rm -rf temp   hope this can help u

User · Answer

Just clone the same project in another folder and copy the  git  folder to your project   Example  Create temp folder    mkdir temp   switch to temp folder   cd temp    clone the same project in the temp folder    git clone  -b branchName  git path to your git repository   copy  git folder to your projet    cp -R  git   path to your project   switch to your project and run git status  delete the temp folder if your are finished   hope this will help someone

User · Answer

In addition  apparently  this error will happen if you clone into NTFS Ram Drive

User · Answer

I had this issue  because  git config contained worktree   D  git-repositories OldName  I just changed it into worktree   D  git-repositories NewName  I discovered that  because I used git gui  which showed a more detailed error message

User · Answer

Just in case what happened to me is happening to somebody else  I need to say this  I was in my  git directory within my project when I was getting this error  I searched and scoured for answers  but nothing worked  All I had to do was get back to the right directory   cd       It was kind of a face-palm moment for me  In case there s anyone else out there as silly as me  I hope you found this answer helpful

User · Answer

Edited the config file and changed  bare   true  to  bare   false

User · Answer

Also  you are probably inside the  git subfolder  move up one folder to your project root

[git] Why am I getting the message, "fatal: This operation must be run in a work tree?"

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