I can't do git Checkout - Railstutorial

Question

I'm getting this error:

Not a git repository (or any parent up to mount parent /Users)
Stopping at filesystem boundary (GIT_DISCOVERY_ACROSS_FILESYSTEM not set).

Before this I was trying to create a user model, but I was getting an error, then I get another where 2 minutes ago I didn't have, so I download the last version of my app from github and started again the chapter.

The first thing was to do a git checkout master , but the error on the top kept showing up. I lost all my cached passwords with a forced reboot, so I thinked "oh probably I just need to do the login on github from the Terminal" but I can't find nothing more than the git config --global user.name "USER_NAME" and the email one, so I tried to configure again github.

On the github helper, after following the first step I had to do git credential-osxkeychain that gave me all the times this error

error: git-credential-osxkeychain died of signal 11

Basicly I don't know what the hell can I do now...

Answer 1

If you haven't cloned a repo, then any git command supposed to work in a git repo (that is, a folder with a .git/ subfolder in it) won't work.
This wouldn't be related to credentials at all: it is caused by the absence of a .git folder containing the local repo.

Instead of the GitHub app, you could clone it directly in command line.

Answer 2

"Not a git repository (or any parent up to mount parent /Users) Stopping at filesystem boundary (GIT_DISCOVERY_ACROSS_FILESYSTEM not set)."

This error message occurs when one attempts to issue certain git commands in a directory that is not currently initialized as a repository.

Git must already be installed on your machine based on this error message, otherwise you'd not have seen it. Not certain, but it sounds like when you downloaded your GitHub repository's .zip file, it was striped of the .git subdirectory. When you issue the command git checkout master git looks for the .git subdirectory to, in layman's terms, "find out what to checkout." Since there is no .git subdir, git doesn't know what to do, and thus the error message.

To correct this, follow the steps here from Github to clone your repository - you may want to do so in an empty directory if you do not want to overwrite the files in the old directory. If you run in to any issues trying to clone, let us know and we can help.

Once the repository has been cloned, then you can checkout branches, commit changes, etc...

Happy trails!