git Warning: remote HEAD refers to nonexistent ref, unable to checkout

Question

I'm trying to setup gitosis according to the instructions here.

It works fine from my remote machine so the server seems to be setup fine but I'd also like to be able to do development on my gitosis server machine from a different user account (not the git user created in the gitosis setup).

I've copied the key and modified the gitosis.conf so that the other user account has access but when I try to clone it seems to work except at the end it says:

git Warning: remote HEAD refers to nonexistent ref, unable to checkout

and I end up with an empty directory except for .git

I've google for this a bit but have no real insight into what the problem is

Answer 1

1. Do the git branch -r and git checkout -b master <remotebranchofinterest>

2. Check the HEAD file in remote .git.

3. Check if somebody already asked the question: here

Answer 2

Keep it simple. Add to gitosis authorization and SSH key for the user account on your server and clone as usual:

user@server$ git clone git@server:repo.git

Answer 3

I found out what was going wrong. The problem was that I wasn't paying attention to the warnings when I was pushing to my gitosis server so I didn't realize that I wasn't pushing a particular branch. I had assumed it would just push the current but that isn't the case until you set:

git config push.default current