fatal: early EOF fatal: index-pack failed

This error may occur for memory needs of git. You can add these lines to your global git configuration file, which is .gitconfig in $USER_HOME, in order to fix that problem.

[core] packedGitLimit = 512m packedGitWindowSize = 512m [pack] deltaCacheSize = 2047m packSizeLimit = 2047m windowMemory = 2047m 

finally solved by git config --global core.compression 9

From a BitBucket issue thread:

I tried almost five times, and it still happen.

Then I tried to use better compression and it worked!

git config --global core.compression 9

From the Git Documentation:

core.compression
An integer -1..9, indicating a default compression level. -1 is the zlib default.
0 means no compression, and 1..9 are various speed/size tradeoffs, 9 being slowest.
If set, this provides a default to other compression variables, such as core.looseCompression and pack.compression.

As @ingyhere said:

Shallow Clone

First, turn off compression:

git config --global core.compression 0 

Next, let's do a partial clone to truncate the amount of info coming down:

git clone --depth 1 <repo_URI> 

When that works, go into the new directory and retrieve the rest of the clone:

git fetch --unshallow 

or, alternately,

git fetch --depth=2147483647 

Now, do a pull:

git pull --all 

Then to solve the problem of your local branch only tracking master

open your git config file (.git/config) in the editor of your choice

where it says:

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

change the line

fetch = +refs/heads/master:refs/remotes/origin/master 

to

fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/* 

Do a git fetch and git will pull all your remote branches now

On Windows I resolved this by running:

git config --global pack.windowMemory 256m 

In my case this was quite helpful:

git clone --depth 1 --branch $BRANCH $URL 

This will limit the checkout to mentioned branch only, hence will speed up the process.

Hope this will help.

I faced this problem with macOS Big Sur M1 Chip and none of the solutions worked for me.

Edit: Works as a solution for M2 Chip aswell.

Edit 2: Works as a solution for M3 Chip aswell.

I solved it by increasing ulimits below.

ulimit -f 2097152 ulimit -c 2097152 ulimit -n 2097152 

Running the commands above, will be valid for only current terminal session, so first run this and then clone the repository.

I tried all of that commands and none works for me, but what works was change the git_url to http instead ssh

if is clone command do :

git clone <your_http_or_https_repo_url> 

else if you are pulling on existing repo, do it with

git remote set-url origin <your_http_or_https_repo_url> 

hope this help someone!

I got this error when git ran out of memory.

Freeing up some memory (in this case: letting a compile job finish) and trying again worked for me.

A previous answer recommends setting to 512m. I'd say there are reasons to think that's counterproductive on a 64bit architecture. The documentation for core.packedGitLimit says:

Default is 256 MiB on 32 bit platforms and 32 TiB (effectively unlimited) on 64 bit platforms. This should be reasonable for all users/operating systems, except on the largest projects. You probably do not need to adjust this value.

If you want to try it out check if you have it set and then remove the setting:

git config --show-origin core.packedGitLimit git config --unset --global core.packedGitLimit 

Edit: Having an Ouroboros moment here it should be mentioned that this in combination with solution from @amirreza-moeini-yegane solved this problem for me today.

git config --global core.compression 0 

In my case it was a connection problem. I was connected to an internal wifi network, in which I had limited access to ressources. That was letting git do the fetch but at a certain time it crashed. This means it can be a network-connection problem. Check if everything is running properly: Antivirus, Firewall, etc.

The answer of elin3t is therefore important because ssh improves the performance of the downloading so that network problems can be avoided

Note that Git 2.13.x/2.14 (Q3 2017) does raise the default core.packedGitLimit which influences git fetch:
The default packed-git limit value has been raised on larger platforms (from 8 GiB to 32 GiB) to save "git fetch" from a (recoverable) failure while "gc" is running in parallel.

See commit be4ca29 (20 Apr 2017) by David Turner (csusbdt).
Helped-by: Jeff King (peff).
^{(Merged by Junio C Hamano -- gitster -- in commit d97141b, 16 May 2017)}

Increase core.packedGitLimit

When core.packedGitLimit is exceeded, git will close packs.
If there is a repack operation going on in parallel with a fetch, the fetch might open a pack, and then be forced to close it due to packedGitLimit being hit.
The repack could then delete the pack out from under the fetch, causing the fetch to fail.

Increase core.packedGitLimit's default value to prevent this.

On current 64-bit x86_64 machines, 48 bits of address space are available.
It appears that 64-bit ARM machines have no standard amount of address space (that is, it varies by manufacturer), and IA64 and POWER machines have the full 64 bits.
So 48 bits is the only limit that we can reasonably care about. We reserve a few bits of the 48-bit address space for the kernel's use (this is not strictly necessary, but it's better to be safe), and use up to the remaining 45.
No git repository will be anywhere near this large any time soon, so this should prevent the failure.

I am facing the issue too, this is my solution:

git fetch --refetch 

From the git-fetch help:

Instead of negotiating with the server to avoid transferring commits and associated objects that are already present locally, this option fetches all objects as a fresh clone would

Setting below's config doesn't work for me.

[core] packedGitLimit = 512m packedGitWindowSize = 512m [pack] deltaCacheSize = 2047m packSizeLimit = 2047m windowMemory = 2047m 

As previous comment, it might the memory issue from git. Thus, I try to reduce working threads(from 32 to 8). So that it won't get much data from server at the same time. Then I also add "-f " to force to sync other projects.

-f: Proceed with syncing other projects even if a project fails to sync. 

Then it works fine now.

repo sync -f -j8 

It's confusing because Git logs may suggest any connection or ssh authorization errors, eg: ssh_dispatch_run_fatal: Connection to x.x.x.x port yy: message authentication code incorrect, the remote end hung up unexpectedly, early EOF.

Server-side solution

Let's optimize git repository on the server side:

1. Enter to my server's git bare repository.
2. Call git gc.
3. Call git repack -A

Eg:

ssh admin@my_server_url.com sudo su git cd /home/git/my_repo_name # where my server's bare repository exists. git gc git repack -A 

Now I am able clone this repository without errors, e.g. on the client side:

git clone git@my_server_url.com:my_repo_name 

The command git gc may be called at the git client side to avoid similar git push problem.

If you are an administrator of Gitlab service - trigger Housekeeping manually. It calls internally git gc or git repack.

Client-side solution

Other (hack, client-side only) solution is downloading last master without history:

git clone --single-branch --depth=1 git@my_server_url.com:my_repo_name 

There is a chance that buffer overflow will not occur.

I have tried for several times after I set git buffer, as I mentioned in the question, it seems work now.

So if you met this error, run this command:

git config --global http.postBuffer 2M 

and then try again for some times.

Reference:

git push error: RPC failed; result=56, HTTP code = 0

None of the solutions above worked for me.

The solution that finally worked for me was switching SSH client. GIT_SSH environment variable was set to the OpenSSH provided by Windows Server 2019. Version 7.7.2.1

C:\Windows\System32\OpenSSH\ssh.exe

I simply installed putty, 0.72

choco install putty

And changed GIT_SSH to

C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\putty.portable\tools\PLINK.EXE

I had the same problem, I even tried to download the project directly from the website as a zip file but the download got interrupted at the exact same percent.

This single line fixed my problem like a charm

git config --global core.compression 0 

I know other answers have mentioned this but, no one here mentioned that this line alone can fix the problem.

Hope it helps.

Network quality matters, try to switch to a different network. What helped me was changing my Internet connection from Virgin Media high speed land-based broadband to a hotspot on my phone.

Before that I tried the accepted answer to limit clone size, tried switching between 64 and 32 bit versions, tried disabling the git file cache, none of them helped.

Then I switched to the connection via my mobile, and the first step (git clone --depth 1 <repo_URI>) succeeded. Switched back to my broadband, but the next step (git fetch --unshallow) also failed. So I deleted the code cloned so far, switched to the mobile network tried again the default way (git clone <repo_URI>) and it succeeded without any issues.

My solution was to eventually use SSH instead of HTTP/HTTPS.

Tried almost all the answers here but no luck.. Finally got it worked by using the Github desktop app, https://desktop.github.com/

Macbook with M1 chip/Monterey not sure if it mattered.

In my case nothing worked when the protocol was https, then I switched to ssh, and ensured, I pulled the repo from last commit and not entire history, and also specific branch. This helped me:

git clone --depth 1 "ssh:.git" --branch “specific_branch”

I have the same problem. Following the first step above i was able to clone, but I cannot do anything else. Can't fetch, pull or checkout old branches.

Each command runs much slower than usual, then dies after compressing the objects.

I:\dev [master +0 ~6 -0]> git fetch --unshallow remote: Counting objects: 645483, done. remote: Compressing objects: 100% (136865/136865), done. error: RPC failed; result=18, HTTP code = 20082 MiB | 6.26 MiB/s fatal: early EOF fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly fatal: index-pack failed 

This also happens when your ref's are using too much memory. Pruning the memory fixed this for me. Just add a limit to what you fetching like so ->

git fetch --depth=100 

This will fetch the files but with the last 100 edits in their histories. After this, you can do any command just fine and at normal speed.

In my case the problem was none of the git configuration parameters but the fact that my repository had one file exceeding the maximum file size allowed on my system. I was able to check it trying to download a large file and getting an "File Size Limit Exceeded" on Debian.

After that I edited my /etc/security/limits.conf file adding et the end of it the following lines:

• hard fsize 1000000
• soft fsize 1000000

To actually "apply" the new limit values you need to re-login

For me it worked when I changed the compression to git config --global core.compression 9

This works

I had an issue with cloning a huge repo. Cloning process fired these errors:

fetch-pack: unexpected disconnect while reading sideband packet fatal: early EOF fatal: fetch-pack: invalid index-pack output 

But the below command (found in the answers in this thread) resolved this issue.

git config --global core.compression 9 repack 

As per my understanding with this command git will use maximally available compression during files retrieval. And if data was compressed, then to able to use it in a normal way, git should "decompress" the data using repack command.

In my case it was one-time exercise, so after the repo was cloned I restored compression settings to the default level

git config --global core.compression -1 

Tried most of the answers here, I got the error with the PUTTY SSH Client with all possible constellations.

Once I switched to OpenSSH the error was gone (remove the Environment Variable GIT_SSH and restart the git bash).

I was using a new machine and newest git versions. On many other/older machines (AWS as well) it did work as expected with PUTTY as well without any git configuration.

Using @cmpickle answer, I built a script to simplify the clone process.

It is hosted here: https://gist.github.com/gianlucaparadise/10286e0b1c5409bd1049d67640fb7c03

You can run it using the following line:

curl -sL https://git.io/JvtZ5 | sh -s repo_uri repo_folder 

Tangentially related and only useful in case you have no root access and manually extract Git from an RPM (with rpm2cpio) or other package (.deb, ..) into a subfolder. Typical use case: you try to use a newer version of Git over the outdated one on a corporate server.

If git clone fails with fatal: index-pack failed without early EOF mention but instead a help message about usage: git index-pack, there is a version mismatch and you need to run git with the --exec-path parameter:

git --exec-path=path/to/subfoldered/git/usr/bin/git clone <repo> 

In order to have this happen automatically, specify in your ~/.bashrc:

export GIT_EXEC_PATH=path/to/subfoldered/git/usr/libexec 

git config --global core.compression 9 repack