How to handle git gc fatal: bad object refs/remotes/origin/HEAD error?

Question

I randomly hit this today while trying to run Git garbage collect:

$ git gc
fatal: bad object refs/remotes/origin/HEAD
error: failed to run repack
         


        

Answer 1

Looks like your symbolic-refs might be broken... Try the replacing it with your default branch like this: For example, my default branch is master

$ git symbolic-ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD refs/remotes/origin/master
$ git fetch --prune
$ git gc

That should fix it.