Git Checkout warning: unable to unlink files, permission denied

Question

I am aware that there are similar issues about git relating to the \'unable to unlink\' warning, but I have not been able to use them.

The main difference is that th

Answer 1

This can also occur when:

1. You ran a process inside a Docker container, and:

2. Some files were generated by that process, and:

3. The destination of the files is mounted as a volume on the Docker host, and:

4. You are running git on the Docker host.

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If this is the case, stage the files you wish to commit and run:

git diff --name-only --cached | xargs ls -l 

Files which meet the above criteria will be prefixed with:

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root ...

They are owned by root and not writable, which is not good. To fix that run:

 git diff --name-only --cached | xargs -i sh -c 'sudo chown $USER:$USER {}; chmod +w {}'

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A cleaner solution would probably be to use the --user option, see this for Docker and this for Docker compose.