Git push error '[remote rejected] master -> master (branch is currently checked out)'

Question

Yesterday, I posted a question on how to clone a Git repository from one of my machines to another, How can I \'git clone\' from another machine?.

I am now

Answer 1

Older versions of Git used to allow pushes to the currently checked out branch of a non-bare repository.

It turns out this was a terribly confusing thing to allow. So they added the warning message you see, which is also terribly confusing.

If the first repository is just acting as a server then convert it to a bare repository as the other answers recommend and be done with it.

If however you need to have a shared branch between two repos that are both in use you can achieve it with the following setup

Repo1 - will act as the server and also be used for development

Repo2 - will be for development only

Setup Repo1 as follows

Create a branch to share work on.

git branch shared_branch

To be safe, you should also create a $(REPO).git/hooks/update that rejects any changes to anything other than shared_branch, because you don't want people mucking with your private branches.

repo1/.git/hooks  (GIT_DIR!)$ cat update
#!/bin/sh
refname="$1"
oldrev="$2"
newrev="$3"

if [ "${refname}" != "refs/heads/shared_branch" ]
then
   echo "You can only push changes to shared_branch, you cannot push to ${refname}"
   exit 1
fi

Now create a local branch in repo1 where you will do your actual work.

git checkout -b my_work --track shared_branch
Branch my_work set up to track local branch shared_branch.
Switched to a new branch 'my_work'

(may need to git config --global push.default upstream in order for git push to work)

Now you can create repo2 with

git clone path/to/repo1 repo2 
git checkout shared_branch 

At this point you have both repo1 and repo2 setup to work on local branches that push and pull from shared_branch in repo1, without needing to worry about that error message or having the working directory get out of sync in repo1. Whatever normal workflow you use should work.