Your configuration specifies to merge with the <branch name> from the remote, but no such ref was fetched.?

What this means

Your upstream—the remote you call origin—no longer has, or maybe never had (it's impossible to tell from this information alone) a branch named feature/Sprint4/ABC-123-Branch. There's one particularly common reason for that: someone (probably not you, or you'd remember) deleted the branch in that other Git repository.

What to do

This depends on what you want. See the discussion section below. You can:

create or re-create the branch on the remote, or

delete your local branch, or

anything else you can think of.

Discussion

You must be running git pull (if you were running git merge you would get a different error message or no error message at all).

When you run git fetch, your Git contacts another Git, based on the url line under the [remote "origin"] section of your configuration. That Git runs a command (upload-pack) that, among other things, sends your Git a list of all branches. You can use git ls-remote to see how this works (try it, it is educational). Here is a snippet of what I get when running this on a Git repository for git itself:

$ git ls-remote origin
From [url]
bbc61680168542cf6fd3ae637bde395c73b76f0f    HEAD
60115f54bda3a127ed3cc8ffc6ab6c771cbceb1b    refs/heads/maint
bbc61680168542cf6fd3ae637bde395c73b76f0f    refs/heads/master
5ace31314f460db9aef2f1e2e1bd58016b1541f1    refs/heads/next
9e085c5399f8c1883cc8cdf175b107a4959d8fa6    refs/heads/pu
dd9985bd6dca5602cb461c4b4987466fa2f31638    refs/heads/todo
[snip]

The refs/heads/ entries list all of the branches that exist on the remote,¹ along with the corresponding commit IDs (for refs/tags/ entries the IDs may point to tag objects rather than commits).

Your Git takes each of these branch names and changes it according to the fetch line(s) in that same remote section. In this case, your Git replaces refs/heads/master with refs/remotes/origin/master, for instance. Your Git does this with every branch name that comes across.

It also records the original names in the special file FETCH_HEAD (you can see this file if you peek into your own .git directory). This file saves the fetched names and IDs.

The git pull command is meant as a convenience short-cut: it runs git fetch on the appropriate remote, and then git merge (or, if so instructed, git rebase) with whatever arguments are needed to merge (or rebase) as directed by the [branch ...] section. In this case, your [branch "feature/Sprint4/ABC-123-Branch"] section says to fetch from origin, then merge with whatever ID was found under the name refs/heads/feature/Sprint4/ABC-123-Branch.

Since nothing was found under that name, git pull complains and stops.

If you run this as two separate steps, git fetch and then git merge (or git rebase), your Git would look at your cached remotes/origin/ remote-tracking branches to see what to merge with or rebase onto. If there was such a branch at one time, you may still have the remote-tracking branch. In this case, you would not get an error message. If there was never such a branch, or if you have run git fetch with --prune (which removes dead remote-tracking branches), so that you have no corresponding remote-tracking branch, you would get a complaint, but it would refer to origin/feature/Sprint4/ABC-123-Branch instead.

In either case, we can conclude that feature/Sprint4/ABC-123-Branch does not exist now on the remote named origin.

It probably did exist at one time, and you probably created your local branch from the remote-tracking branch. If so, you probably still have the remote-tracking branch. You might investigate to see who removed the branch from the remote, and why, or you might just push something to re-create it, or delete your remote-tracking branch and/or your local branch.

1Well, all that it is going to admit to, at least. But unless they have specifically hidden some refs, the list includes everything.

Edit, Jul 2020: There's a new fetch protocol that can avoid listing everything, and only list names that your Git says it's looking for. This can help with repositories that have huge numbers of branches and/or tags. However, if your Git is interested in all possible names, you'll still get all the names here.

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This can also happen if you/someone renamed the branch. So follow these steps (if you know that branch name is renamed) Assuming earlier branch name as wrong-branch-name and someone renamed it to correct-branch-name So.

git checkout correct-branch-name

git pull (you'll see this "Your configuration specifies..")

git branch --unset-upstream

git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/correct-branch-name

for older git versions git push --set-upstream origin correct-branch-name

git pull (you'll not get the earlier message )

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Check if your remote branch is available to pull. I had the same issue, finally realized the remote branch was deleted by someone.

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This is a more common error now as many projects are moving their master branch to another name like main, primary, default, root, reference, latest, etc, as discussed at Github plans to replace racially insensitive terms like ‘master’ and ‘whitelist’.

To fix it, first find out what the project is now using, which you can find via their github, gitlab or other git server.

Then do this to capture the current configuration:

$ git branch -vv
...
* master  968695b [origin/master] Track which contest a ballot was sampled for (#629)
...

Find the line describing the master branch, and note whether the remote repo is called origin, upstream or whatever.

Then using that information, change the branch name to the new one, e.g. if it says you're currently tracking origin/master, substitute main:

git branch master --set-upstream-to origin/main

You can also rename your own branch to avoid future confusion:

git branch -m main

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For me it was a case sensitivity issue. My local branch was Version_feature2 instead of Version_Feature2. I re-checked out my branch using the correct casing and then git pull worked.

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You can easily link your local branch with remote one by running:

git checkout <your-local-branch>
git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/<correct-remote-branch> <your-local-branch>
git pull

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I got a similar error when the actual cause was that my disk was full. After deleting some files, git pull began to work as I expected.

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In my case I was simply lacking of initial commit on remote branch, so local branch wasn't finding anything to pull and it was giving that error message.

I did:

git commit -m 'first commit' // on remote branch
git pull // on local branch

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This error can also be received when the origin branch name has some case issue.

For example: origin branch is team1-Team and the local branch has been checkout as team1-team. Then, this T in -Team and t in -team can cause such error. This happened in my case. So, by changing the local name with the origin branch's name, the error was solved.

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I've found this error occurs frequently when pulling updates from a repo whose default master branch has been renamed to main. Encountered this a lot after the 2020 trend of renaming master branch to main branch.

So if you had previously cloned a repo with the default master branch and that branch has since been renamed to main, one way to fix is by simply pointing your upstream from master to main:

git branch --set-upstream-to=origin/main master

If that command succeeds, you should see a message like this:

Branch 'master' set up to track remote branch 'main' from 'origin'.

You can then rename your local branch from master to main (to keep consistent with the remote branch name) with git branch -m master main

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I kept running into this issue. In my case, @Jerreck's comment about case differences in the branch names was the cause of this error. Some Windows tools aren't aware of case sensitivity.

To turn off case-sensitivity in git, run this command:

git config --global core.ignorecase true

Note that this will impact more than branch names. For example, if you have "Foo.h" and "foo.h" in the same directory (not a great idea when building software for Windows) then I suspect you cannot turn off case sensitivity.

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I had a similar issue with master/main branch. In my case I did not have enough free space on my harddisk. After freeing up some space, it worked.

I assume its because the files /.git needs some space to edit its file. For example the file: 'refs/heads/feature/Sprint4/ABC-123-Branch'

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Check for case sensitivity

In my case, my branch name (remote) had uppercase letters, for example: BranchName. Accidently, I created a branch branchname (all lower case) on my local machine and set upstream to the same, and this error appeared.

Solution: I deleted the local repository, cloned it again, and checked out to BranchName

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In my case, i had deleted the original branch from which my current branch derived from. So in the .git/config file i had:

[branch "simil2.1.12"]
    remote = origin
    merge = refs/heads/simil2.0.5
    rebase = false

the simil2.0.5 was deleted. I replaced it with the same branch name:

[branch "simil2.1.12"]
    remote = origin
    merge = refs/heads/simil2.1.12
    rebase = false

and it worked

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In my case, I renamed the branch on Github which in return told me to execute the following commands:

The default branch has been renamed!

main is now named <new_name>

If you have a local clone, you can update it by running:

git branch -m main <new_name>
git fetch origin
git branch -u origin/<new_name> <new_name>
git remote set-head origin -a

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For me this happened because i merged a branch dev into master using web interface and then tried to sync/pull using VSCode which was open on dev branch.(its weird that i could not change to master without getting this error.)

git pull
Your configuration specifies to merge with the ref 'refs/heads/dev'
from the remote, but no such ref was fetched.'

It makes sense that is not finding it refs/heads/dev - for me it was easier to just delete the local folder and clone again.

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Just check if someone deleted the branch at remote.

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I just got exactly this error when doing "git pull" when my disk was full. Created some space and it all started working fine again.

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I just got the same error, when I didn't use the correct case. I could checkout out 'integration'. Git told me to perform a git pull to update my branch. I did that, but received the mentioned error. The correct branch name is 'Integration' with a capital 'I'. When I checked out that branch and pulled, it worked without problem.

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Rename the local branch

git branch -m temp

Display all branches

git branch -a

Check out the specific remote branch

git checkout main

Delete the temp branch

git branch -d temp

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You can edit the ~/.gitconfig file in your home folder. This is where all --global settings are saved.

Or, use git config --global --unset-all remote.origin.url and after run git fetch with repository url.

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I was facing the same issue where my current branch was dev and I was checking out to MR branch and doing git pull thereafter. An easy workaround that I took was I created a new folder for MR Branch and did git pull there followed by git clone.

So basically I maintained different folders for pushing code to different branch.

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In my case the master cannot be fetched in a new project.

And it worked after I put this in the command line,

git config --global http.sslVerify false

ref: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucketserverkb/can-t-access-bitbucket-server-with-git-issuer-certificate-is-invalid-779171808.html

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The branch's pull request in the Github repo was approved, it was merged into the dev branch and doesn't exist on origin any more.

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In my case the repo was temporary unavailable (under maintenance).

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I have gotten this exact error, but none of the suggested answers (possibly the case sensitivity) was the issue. They probably are for 99% of the issues out there, but that still leaves 1%.

It turned out, mixing WSL / Linux file shares and Windows base directories was the problem. I was running WSL (Ubuntu 20.04) and has a repo that was accessed / edited from Windows, but the code was running on WSL. I may have done some git status checks from the WSL side.

The repo existed, the case was correct, the internet worked fine, none of the branches were removed, etc. Yet I also got the error Your configuration specifies to merge with the from the remote, but no such ref was fetched.?

What my fix was, was to make sure all of the items were pushed / all changes recorded, then I just removed the directory and did a 'git clone' again from Windows. Then the 'git checkout' worked fine. I realize this isn't really an answer, but it did work.

I was doing Linux development where a code library automates certain operations, including 'git clone'; however, I normally do my code pushes from Windows. My guess is that the .git folder is not cross-platform compatible (not that I had any expectation it was). Yet, it usually works. Is it a bug? Debateable.

git will also occasionally try too hard to be nice and munge line endings; that's a different problem (and bordering on religion. I'm an Agnostic. Yes, there's a setting.)

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Happened to me when installing packages with yarn. An own dependency had a renaming of branch main into master. Only updating upstream on the dependency did not fix it, I additionally had to clean the yarn cache.

Project A renamed the main branch (main -> master). Project A is a dependency of Project B. yarn install on Project B <-- causes error Push updated upstream on Project A yarn install on Project B <-- causes error yarn cache clean yarn install on Project B <-- works now

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If another pull just works, it means your internet wasn't connected.

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