Pushing a large github repo fails with “unable to push to unqualified destination: master”

Question

I have a large git repo (created from an SVN repo) and I want to push it to github. Given it\'s large, I can\'t just try and push it directly, as it fails with a \"pack too

Answer 1

This worked for me: I created the remote branch on github UI and then pushed my local branch which had the same name to it. Try it in case other ways dont work. Other way would be creating a new branch locally and pushing an empty branch and later cherry-pick your commit and push again to your remote.

Check this as well similar issue: When deleting remote git branch "error: unable to push to unqualified destination"

Answer 2

I had this same error and found that I'd spelled the name of my branch wrong. So you could find that double checking the branch name to ensure any capital letters etc are in the right place.

Answer 3

Push to refs/heads/master, just this one time.

git push origin whatever:refs/heads/master

That will create it unambiguously as a branch, and you'll be able to push to it normally in the future.

This works because there's no remote ref named master (it hasn't been created yet), the target ref isn't fully-qualified with refs/ so git can't figure it out based on that, and the source ref is a hash rather than a name, so it can't figure it out based on that either. By pushing to refs/heads/master it works because the second condition is true, and then afterwards master exists on the remote so the first condition is true

Answer 4

You can also create a new branch with

git checkout -b branchName

and then push your git repository to that branch

git push origin whatever:branchName