Git post-receive hook fails to checkout, fatal: You are on a branch yet to be born

Question

On my server, in /home/user/git/domain.com.git/ , I ran git init --bare , then created post-receive file in hooks dir & chmod +x hooks/post-receive . I used ls -la to verify it is executable.

My post-receive file:

mkdir /home/USER/pub/domain.com
GIT_WORK_TREE=/home/USER/pub/domain.com git checkout -f
GIT_WORK_TREE=/home/USER/pub/domain.com git reset --hard

I execute git push remotename branchname from local and get the error:

remote: fatal: You are on a branch yet to be born

It also shows:

To ssh://domain.com/~/git/domain.com.git
   oldcommithash..newhash  branchname -> branchname

I know the post-receive hook is running because my mkdir gives me a directory already exists error, which is to be expected and causes no problems on my other sites using this setup.

I also have this problem with git push remotename HEAD which is what I want to use, ultimately, for simpler scripting.

Answer 1

My latest hooks/post-receive script, which will update /home/user/PATH with the most recent push.

#!/bin/bash

user=REMOTE_USER_NAME
path=pub/domain.com

# Loop over all pushed branches
c=0;
while read oldrev newrev refname
do
    # track count of branches
    c=$((c + 1))
    branch=$(git rev-parse --symbolic --abbrev-ref "$refname")
done
# If more than one branch was pushed, give an error & return
if [[ $c -gt 1 ]];then
    echo ""
    echo "Multiple branches were pushed. Cannot update remote site."
    echo ""
    return;
fi
# Make the directory. Gives an error if it exists, but who cares?
mkdir "/home/${user}/${path}"

# Checkout the pushed branch & reset --hard
GIT_WORK_TREE="/home/${user}/${path}" git checkout -f "${branch}"
GIT_WORK_TREE="/home/${user}/${path}" git reset --hard

References

• https://stackoverflow.com/a/13057643/802469 gave me the while loop for this solution
• a near duplicate git - remote: fatal: you are on a branch yet to be born, using post-receive hook which suggests specifying the name of the branch, but it's not quite what I wanted