error: cannot lock ref.. 'refs/tags' exists; cannot create 'refs/tags/

Question

I\'m getting a strange \"cannot lock ref\" error when trying to pull changes from github. I\'ve tried git gc, and looked around for similar errors but can\'t find a solution.

Answer 1

Your Git is complaining that a reference (rather than a directory) named refs/tags exists. It's not clear what would create that, but see if git rev-parse refs/tags produces a hash ID. If so, that reference needs to go away:

git update-ref -d refs/tags

after which git fetch should work.

If git rev-parse refs/tags fails (which it should—refs/tags itself should not be a valid name) then this is not the problem and it's not clear what the actual problem is.