git pull displays “fatal: Couldn't find remote ref refs/heads/xxxx” and hangs up

Question

I created a branch called \'6796\', then I pushed it to remote, checked it out on another machine, made other edits, pushed it, then merged it with the master, and deleted it -

Answer 1

In my case, it happenned for the master branch. Later found that my access to the project was accidentally revoked by the project manager. To cross-check, I visited the review site and couldn't see any commits of the said branch and others for that project.

Answer 2

I had a similar issue when I tried to get a pull with a single quote ' in it's name.

I had to escape the pull request name:

git pull https://github.com/foo/bar namewithsingle"'"quote

Answer 3

This error could be thrown in the following situation as well.

You want to checkout branch called feature from remote repository but the error is thrown because you already have branch called feature/<feature_name> in your local repository.

Simply checkout the feature branch under a different name:

git checkout -b <new_branch_name> <remote>/feature

Answer 4

I just ran into a similar issue when I tried to commit to a newly created repo with a "." in it's name. I've seen several others have different issues with putting a "." in the repo name.

I just re-created the repo and

replaced "." with "-"

There may be other ways to resolve this, but this was a quick fix for me since it was a new repo.

Answer 5

There are probably some commands to resolve it, but I would start by looking in your .git/config file for references to that branch, and removing them.

Answer 6

To pull a remote branch locally, I do the following:

git checkout -b branchname // creates a local branch with the same name and checks out on it

git pull origin branchname // pulls the remote one onto your local one

The only time I did this and it didn't work, I deleted the repo, cloned it again and repeated the above 2 steps; it worked.