How to resolve git's “not something we can merge” error

Question

I just encountered a problem when merging a branch into master in git. First, I got the branch name by running git ls-remote. Let\'s call that branch \"branch-n

Answer 1

We got this error because we had a comma (,) in the branch name. We deleted the local branch, then re-checked it under a new name without the comma. We were able to merge it successfully.

Answer 2

As shown in How does "not something we can merge" arise?, this error can arise from a typo in the branch name because you are trying to pull a branch that doesn't exist.

If that is not the problem (as in my case), it is likely that you don't have a local copy of the branch that you want to merge. Git requires local knowledge of both branches in order to merge those branches. You can resolve this by checking out the branch to merge and then going back to the branch you want to merge into.

git checkout branch-name
git checkout master
git merge branch-name

This should work, but if you receive an error saying

error: pathspec 'remote-name/branch-name' did not match any file(s) known to git.

you need to fetch the remote (probably, but not necessarily, "origin") before checking out the branch:

git fetch remote-name

Answer 3

I had this issue as well. The branch looked like 'username/master' which seemed to confuse git as it looked like a remote address I defined. For me using this

git merge origin/username/master

worked perfectly fine.

Answer 4

This may sounds weird, but remember to setup your git email and name:

git config --global user.email "MY@EMAIL.COM"
git config --global user.name "FIRST_NAME LAST_NAME"

Answer 5

I had the same problem. I fixed it using the command below:

git checkout main
git fetch
git checkout branch_name
git fetch
git checkout main
git fetch
git merge branch_name

Answer 6

When pulling from a remote upstream, git fetch --all did the trick for me:

git remote add upstream [url to the original repo]
git checkout [branch to be updated]
git fetch --all
git merge upstream/[branch to be updated]

In other cases, I found the "Not something we can merge" error will also happen if the remote (origin, upstream) branch does not exist. This might seem obvious, but you might find yourself doing git merge origin/develop on a repo that only has master.