git pull fails with “Either the application has not called WSAStartup, or WSAStartup failed”

Question

I have just installed Windows 10, Visual Studio Community 2015, and Git for Windows. I also installed the latest Bitbucket and GitHub extensions.

Within Visual Studio I cloned my Bitbucket.com-hosted repository, and performed these operations successfully:

$ git --version
git version 2.19.2.windows.1

$ git pull
Already up to date.

But then when I tried to pull from another repository I got this error:

$ git pull git://github.com/aegif/CmisSync.git
fatal: unable to lookup github.com (port 9418) (Either the application has not called WSAStartup, or WSAStartup failed. )

I am able to ping github.com though.

How can I investigate and fix the problem?

Answer 1

For those who can't edit the URL, downgrading git to the previous version appears to work.

This seems to be an issue with git version 2.19.2.windows.1

Answer 2

A low-tech workaround is to replace git:// with https:// in the URL.
The command then goes smoothly.

Warnings:

• It only works read-only, so if you might want to push to the repository any time in the future then use PhillyAI's solution instead.
• Please note that while it currently works with GitHub, this trick might not work with other Git servers.

Answer 3

It is a known bug in earlier versions of Git for Windows.

Upgrade/Install version greater than 2.20.0.

You can check currently installed version with command $ git --version

Answer 4

I found out there is one more solution, which is to navigate to the .git folder, changing the

[remote "origin"]
        url = git://github.com/yourUsername/yourRepo.git

to

[remote "origin"]
        url = https://github.com/yourUsername/yourRepo.git

fixes the problem if one does not want to downgrade the git client