fatal: could not open '.git/COMMIT_EDITMSG': Permission denied

Question

I am trying to deploy octopress on github pages. I followed these instructions:

http://octopress.org/docs/deploying/github/

It all worked well until the comm

Answer 1

This is not an error message from the remote Git repository, this is a problem with your local files. You probably used git (or rake) as another user (such as root) in this same directory, and it created files which you now can't overwrite.

Simply use chown to change the ownership of the files to your current user, for instance:

chown -R $(whoami) .