How do I check if a repository is bare?

Question

I\'m getting the warning

warning: You did not specify any refspecs to push, and the current remote
warning: has not configured any push refspecs. The default         


        

Answer 1

The message you’re getting means that your remote repository is empty (which has nothing to do with being bare). When pushing into a remote repository for the first time you need to specify what to push:

git push origin master

This will push your current master branch to the remote repository. Subsequent invocations of git push will pushing “matching” branches, i.e. if there’s a “master” branch in the remote repository your local “master” branch will be pushed to it.

Answer 2

How do I check that it is bare?

As mentioned in the answer below (upvoted) by jberryman, if you have access to the remote repo, you can run in it:

git rev-parse --is-bare-repository 

It was introduced as early as commit 493c774, Git 1.5.3 (Sept. 2007) and commit 7ae3df8 by Matthias Lederhofer (matled).

When the repository is bare print "true", otherwise "false".

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You could use (from git config):

 git config --add push.default current

to specify what you want to push by default.

or:

 git config --global push.default matching

if you have many repositories.

current: push the current branch to a branch of the same name.

Check also if the warning was not followed by an error message like in this SO question.

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So your destination repo may be a bare one, but, as said in Sensible Git Refspecs:

When you do a git pull, fetch, push and some others you need to specify a refspec for the current repository.
A refspec describes the mapping between the local reference and the remote one, so you can push (or pull etc) the master branch head and store it as your origin branch head. Basically it’s a way of mapping branches between repos.

See also "concept of bared shared repository in git".

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Note: it is true than from Git1.6.3, :

"git push" into a branch that is currently checked out will be refused by default.
You can choose what should happen upon such a push by setting the configuration variable receive.denyCurrentBranch in the receiving repository.

But I do not think this is what you are seeing right now.

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As mentioned in "all about "bare" repos -- what, why, and how to fix a non-bare push" (at the bottom)

To make it a "real" bare repo, just delete all the files except .git, then mv .git/* .; rmdir .git.
Finally, edit the file called config and change bare = false to bare = true.

So if your destination repo has a config file with bare = true, it is a bare repo.

Answer 3

try

 $ git config --get core.bare

Answer 4

Open the config file in the .get directory and look for bare = true.

Answer 5

It doesn't sound like that was your problem, but to actually answer the question you asked in the title: you can run...

$ git rev-parse --is-bare-repository

...to query if a repo is bare or not. Returns 'true' or 'false'.