I’m playing around with git as a possible replacement for Subversion (svn). I’ll probably blog about my reasons for wanting to switch and also have some tutorials. For now, I wanted to quickly share the fix for a problem I encountered that wasn’t really handled by the documentation.

I set up a bare remote repository to test git out. Everything looked good as I got this going, but then I hit a big snag.

When I tried to push the local repository back to the remote repository, I received the following error:

$ git push repository master
Counting objects: 9, done.
Compressing objects: 100% (5/5), done.
Writing objects: 100% (5/5), 531 bytes, done.
Total 5 (delta 3), reused 0 (delta 0)
*** Project description file hasn’t been set
error: hooks/update exited with error code 1
error: hook declined to update refs/heads/master
To ssh://username@hostname/projectname
! [remote rejected] master -> master (hook declined)
error: failed to push some refs to ‘ssh://username@hostname/~/projectname’

I have to say that this was completely unexpected as I had followed tutorials in the official documentation up to this point. None of the steps said anything about a “project description file” nor about new bare repositories requiring additional setup in order to be pushed to.

Fortunately, this problem wasn’t difficult to fix. There is a file inside the bare repository’s root called description. I simply modified this file and the next time I pushed the changes, it worked like a charm.

If your bare repository is in ~/projects/test.git, you would do the following:

  1. Modify the description file:
    vi ~/projects/test.git/description
  2. Delete the existing text:
    Unnamed repository; edit this file to name it for gitweb.
  3. Put whatever description you want for the repository in the file:
    My Really Awesome Project
  4. As always, save the file and close vi.

Now you can push without this nasty error hanging you up.

As a side note, the developers of git have a hosted git solution that is really cool. It’s called github, you should check it out.