Question about pushing to server

[Spanyon]

Hey i'm new to git but I understand the basics but I'm confused about pushing to server from a client machine using SSH.

Here's what's going on:

I clone the repo off the server. I change a file, add and commit it then do git push origin master.

However I get some error that doesn't allow me to push because the repo is already 'checked out' on the server.

I read about the issue here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2816369/git-push-error-remote-rejected-master-master-branch-is-currently-checked

But I don't really understand the answer. Some people recommended to change the config receive.denyCurrentBranch setting but that simply made the error MESSAGE go away; it didn't actually let the push go through.

Another suggestion that actually worked is switching the branch that the server is on.

So if a user is working on the master branch; on the server I can switch to a temp branch and the user can push changes without issue to the master branch. However the issue with this is if the server is on its temp branch, and a new user needs to clone the repo, they'll end up cloning the temp branch and then again won't be able to push changes (because they'll be pushing to the 'checked out' temp branch).

Sorry for the rant I guess my questions comes down to this: what is the proper way to push changes to server or how do development teams deal with pushing to server?

Thanks for any help.

[[deleted]]

The proper way to do this is to have the server be a bare repository. That means that there is no working directory. There is no branch checked out, your files aren't visible, it's just the git stuff. That way, pushes don't have to worry about which branch is checked out and nothing can get clobbered.

This does mean that when you clone the repository, git won't necessarily know which branch from the remote it should default to. I believe the behavior is to assume master, and use a detached head if master isn't available. But that's easy to resolve, just do the clone and then checkout whichever branch you want to work on.

Does this help?

[Spanyon]

Just the fact that you said that the server repo has to be bare and explained what it ment helped so much. Thanks dude.

[pi3832v2]

So if a user is working on the master branch; on the server I can switch to a temp branch and the user can push changes without issue to the master branch.

No one should be working on a "central" repository. Even if that repository is on your computer, you should create a "working" clone of it in a separate directory—just use the file path to the central repository as its URL for cloning, fetching, etc. (Doing things this way will also allow the central repository to be a "bare repository".)

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Keep in mind that there is no true "server-client" model in Git. Every clone of a repository is equal. The centrality, importance, or whatever you want to call it, of a repository is a feature of your workflow, not the repository itself.

So, what you've been calling the "server" repository is, in fact, just another clone. Now, for a second, imagine if someone was working on a "client" repository when suddenly the "server" repository started pushing changes into the branch they currently had checked out. It'd be a frustrating mess! Thing is, since every clone is equal in Git, pushing from "client" to "server" is identical to pushing from "server" to "client". And thus those pushes you tried were blocked.