Github remote push pack size exceeded

Question

I am new to Git and have a fairly large project that I want to push to a remote repo (Repo B) on Github. The original project was on Github as well but from a different repo

Answer 1

As onionjake noted in his answer, the pack.packSizeLimit setting does not affect pushes. As he suggested, this can often be addressed by using multiple pushes with fewer commits each. rurban posted a comment on how to automatically push chunks of 500 commits. Following is a modified version of his comment, generalized to work correctly regardless of whether the branch on the remote does not exist or exists and contains some of the commits already. I also added the --first-parent argument to the git log calls to prevent errors when the repository contains multiple root commits. I also made some tweaks to improve effiency, and added an additional call to git push to push the final (partial) batch of commits:

# Adjust the following variables as necessary
REMOTE=origin
BRANCH=$(git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD)
BATCH_SIZE=500

# check if the branch exists on the remote
if git show-ref --quiet --verify refs/remotes/$REMOTE/$BRANCH; then
    # if so, only push the commits that are not on the remote already
    range=$REMOTE/$BRANCH..HEAD
else
    # else push all the commits
    range=HEAD
fi
# count the number of commits to push
n=$(git log --first-parent --format=format:x $range | wc -l)

# push each batch
for i in $(seq $n -$BATCH_SIZE 1); do
    # get the hash of the commit to push
    h=$(git log --first-parent --reverse --format=format:%H --skip $i -n1)
    echo "Pushing $h..."
    git push $REMOTE ${h}:refs/heads/$BRANCH
done
# push the final partial batch
git push $REMOTE HEAD:refs/heads/$BRANCH

Answer 2

The packsize limit does not affect git protocol commands (your push).

From git-config under pack.packSizeLimit:

The maximum size of a pack. This setting only affects packing to a file when repacking, i.e. the git:// protocol is unaffected.

When executing a push git will always create exactly one pack no matter the size!

To fix this use two (or more) pushes:

git push remoteB <some previous commit on master>:master
...
git push remoteB <some previous commit after the last one>:master
git push remoteB master

These pushes will all have smaller packs and will succeed.