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I am trying the checkout a branch from a remote repository into a local branch, and receive the above error.

For those who want to direct me to: Why is it not a commit and a branch cannot be created from it?, then I already tried fetching, and even git fetch --all

To be precise, I cannot checkout any branch on the Github repository, that is not the main branch that I'm tracking, let's call it dev.

So, I can do the following:

git checkout origin/dev -b my_own_dev_env

But I cannot checkout any other branch, not even

git checkout origin/master -b master

And in this case I receive

"fatal: 'origin/master' is not a commit and a branch 'master' cannot be created from it"

Edit: When cloning to a new directory, I can perform all git operations as usual. So I would like to know what could go wrong in a local copy that prevents git commands from working properly?

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  • 1
    We're going to need a lot more information. Lets start with, can you checkout your branch if you create a clean clone of the remote? Can you confirm that the branch exists on the remote? What's the configuration of origin, etc. ? Commented Aug 7, 2019 at 7:53
  • (1) What is that backslash doing in your quoted text? Typo in pasting the error message? (Use cut-and-paste to avoid typos.) (2) Did you use git clone --single-branch originally? Commented Aug 7, 2019 at 9:34
  • @Liam, thanks, after cloning the repo again, I can checkout any branch I want. So still, I would like to work on the same local directory I was working on. What is preventing me from checking out branches? Commented Aug 7, 2019 at 9:42
  • @torek - (1) thanks, edited. (2) not, I cloned without the single_branch option. Commented Aug 7, 2019 at 9:43
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    Aha. That's the setting for --single-branch. If you didn't use git clone --depth or git clone --single-branch, you must have set it some other way. Set this back to normal, and git fetch will make `git checkout work again. See stackoverflow.com/q/17714159/1256452 Commented Aug 7, 2019 at 9:51

3 Answers 3

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First check whether you have fetched all branches or not by executing following command.

git fetch --all

Check for existence of branch name in local

git branch -a

Execute command to track remote branch and create one in local

git checkout -t origin/<Branch Name>
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2

You may have limited fetch configurations for your remote. See .git/config for your remote, it may have something like the following.

[remote "origin"] url = <url> fetch = +refs/heads/main:refs/remotes/origin/main

As such git fetch will only get main. To fix you can update it to

[remote "origin"] url = <url> fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
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1

For me works to remove the origin and add it again. Then branch were added git remote remove origin

git remote add origin <url>

git fetch origin

git checkout -b 'feature/XXX' 'origin/feature/XXX'

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1 Comment

Thank you, this is the only solution that worked for me. In my case I think I made a mistake by doing a git pull --unshallow, which apparently prevented me from fetching from origin.

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