Error pushing to GitHub - insufficient permission for adding an object to repository database

Question

I'm getting back an unusual error while trying to do a "git push" to my GitHub repository:

Counting objects: 8, done.
Delta compression using 2 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (4/4), done.
Writing objects: 100% (5/5), 1.37 KiB, done.
Total 5 (delta 2), reused 0 (delta 0)
error: insufficient permission for adding an object to repository database ./objects

fatal: failed to write object
error: unpack-objects exited with error code 128
error: unpack failed: unpack-objects abnormal exit
To git@github.com:bixo/bixo.git
 ! [remote rejected] master -> master (n/a (unpacker error))
error: failed to push some refs to 'git@github.com:bixo/bixo.git'

After a clean clone from GitHub, I can edit/add/commit/push a modified file.
If I then repeat this a second time I get the above error.
I can push to other GitHub repositories just fine.
I've checked file/directory permissions on my side, and they seem OK.
I'm running git 1.6.2.3 on Mac OS X 10.5.8

The above repository was the source of my fun for a previous Stack Overflow question (SO 1904860), so maybe the GitHub repo got corrupted. The only similar issue I've found via searching was an unpack failed problem reported on github. Has anybody else run into this issue before, especially when not using GitHub?

possible duplicate of [Git Push Error: insufficient permission for adding an object to repository database](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6448242/git-push-error-insufficient-permission-for-adding-an-object-to-repository-datab) — László Papp, Jan 28 '14 at 15:01
Another hint for folks with this error: I got this error because I was using the wrong user to push. My server has user `foo` and `git`; both can read `/opt/git/`, but only `git` can write to it. `git` defaults to current user if none is given in `.git/config`, which I forgot. None of the elaborate answers below were necessary. — Sebastian, Aug 27 '14 at 07:18
Another hint, with this error: If you are using `git worktree`, you might have only a `.git` file, `not a directory` in your repo, which is pointing to the source repo. In this case you might go to the source repo and modify permissions there! This was the solution at least in my case ;) — TkrA, Oct 13 '22 at 07:15

score 216 · Answer 1 · edited Sep 30 '15 at 05:32

216

When you see this error outside of github, here's a remedy.

Got this from: http://mapopa.blogspot.com/2009/10/git-insufficient-permission-for-adding.html

ssh me@myserver
cd repository/.git

sudo chmod -R g+ws *
sudo chgrp -R mygroup *

git config core.sharedRepository true

After this the git daemon should use the group file permissions when writing to .git/objects.

edited Sep 30 '15 at 05:32

radtek

34,210
11
144
111

answered Jun 27 '11 at 15:03

syvex

7,518
9
43
47

4

+1 It worked for us. What's the 's' for in `sudo chmod -R g+ws *`? – Erik B Jul 07 '11 at 12:07
5

This will allow any new files created by another user to maintain the group permissions of the root directory. Otherwise, you'll have errors pushing up to the repository. [See setuid and setgid](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chmod#Special_modes) – syvex Jul 07 '11 at 17:05
I got the same error with Gitorious on Debian 6 and PHPStorm IDE, with this message "error: insufficient permission for adding an object to repository database .git/objects". I used this solution on the projects parent folder, works nice with the "+s trick". – Benj Apr 22 '13 at 08:55
I had to log out and log back in for this to work for me, though it might be related to some other group settings I had set up incorrectly (failing to use `-a` for `append` in `usermod -a -G mygroup me` was the other error I fixed) – cod3monk3y Jan 08 '14 at 01:14
3

repo-config is obsolete. Should be `git config core.sharedRepository true`. – László Papp Jan 28 '14 at 15:03
4

Note: if you use the wildcard "*", hidden files and folders (such as .git!) might not be affected! So if the above doesn't work for you, run the commands for ./.git* as well – Ben Rogmans Sep 05 '14 at 07:26
any idea how to see the name of the git group? – Andrew Heekin Aug 14 '15 at 20:09
If you need to check which group you belongs, type `ls -l`. It will show `` – Eranda Aug 31 '15 at 08:46

score 55 · Answer 2 · edited Mar 06 '14 at 11:02

55

Usually this problem is caused by wrong user and group permissions on your Git servers file-system. The git repository has to be owned by the user and also his group.

Example:

If your user is called "git", his group "gitgroup", and the location of the Git repo is: git@mygitserverxyz.com:path/to/repo.git

then do a:

sudo chown -R git:gitgroup path/to/repo.git/

This fixed the git insufficient permission error for me.

edited Mar 06 '14 at 11:02

rogererens

80
4

answered Sep 10 '10 at 12:36

Bijan

25,559
8
79
71

chown: invalid user: `git:git' – Alan Coromano Apr 01 '13 at 15:08
4

@MariusKavansky try $USER:$USER instead of git:git – dwurf Nov 05 '13 at 23:28
This works only for some time in my case. I have to redo it after some pushes. – BuZZ-dEE Nov 27 '13 at 15:45
This is the best answer, but you should say you can limit the chown to ".git/objects" and the user you call "git" is just the user you are logged with. The fact that is user is known or not by git server is not important. – Tristan Feb 22 '17 at 17:14

score 39 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 03 '14 at 20:43

39

sudo chmod 777 -R .git/objects

answered Sep 03 '14 at 20:43

Farid Movsumov

12,350
8
71
97

4

This worked for me... but WTF?? I have been updating the repo for months and this suddenly started this afternoon... – Gojira Feb 10 '15 at 20:17
The fix for me was almost the same, but involved changing/correcting the owner of some of the files in the .git directory. I had done some git maintenance whilst logged in as 'root', and this seemed to have either changed the owner to root or created some new files with the owner of root that git was relying on. I had an auto-deployment script running under the 'apache' owner which then stopped working. – coatesap Jun 11 '15 at 16:35
9

`chmod 777` is never a good solution, just an unsafe workaround. Try @Syvex's answer instead (with setgid) – 4wk_ Jul 09 '15 at 16:02

score 13 · Answer 4 · answered Jun 16 '16 at 17:04

This happened to me when I tried to git pull. Some analysis showed that somebody had commited with root in the past, thereby creating some objects with root ownership in .git/objects.

So I ran

cd <repo>
la .git/objects/

and that showed root ownership for some objects (directories) like this:

user@host:/repo> la .git/objects/
total 540
drwxr-xr-x 135 user user 4096 Jun 16 16:29 .
drwxr-xr-x   8 user user 4096 Jun 16 16:33 ..
drwxr-xr-x   2 user user 4096 Mar  1 17:28 01
drwxr-xr-x   2 user user 4096 Mar  1 17:28 02
drwxr-xr-x   2 user user 4096 Jun 16 16:27 03
drwxr-xr-x   2 user user 4096 Mar  3 13:22 04
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root 4096 Jun 16 16:29 05
drwxr-xr-x   2 user user 4096 Jun 16 16:28 07
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root 4096 Jun 16 16:29 08

Then I ran

sudo chown -R user:user .git/objects/

and it worked!

I was replacing user with my real user, of course.

score 5 · Answer 5 · answered Mar 10 '13 at 06:44

Nothing of the above worked for me. A couple of hours later I found the reason for the problem: I used a repo url of the type

ssh://git@example.com/~git/repo.git

Unfortunately I stored a putty session with the name example.com which was configured to login as user myOtherUser.

So, while I thought git connects to the host example.com with the User 'git', Git/TortoiseGit has connected to the putty session example.com which uses the User myOtherUser. This leads to the exact same ..insufficient permission.. error (cause both users are in different groups).

Solution: Rename the putty session example.com to myOtherUse@example.com

score 5 · Answer 6 · edited Feb 22 '17 at 17:10

5

chmod should be chown, so the correct line is:

sudo chown -R gituser:gituser objects

edited Feb 22 '17 at 17:10

Tristan

8,733
7
48
96

answered Oct 25 '11 at 15:08

rubyan

51
1
5

score 3 · Answer 7 · answered Jul 31 '12 at 17:12

Oddly enough, I had this issue on one clone of the repo I had, but not another I had. Aside from re-cloning the repo (which a coworker did to successfully get around this issue), I managed to do a "git reset" to the commit I had before the failures started. Then I re-committed the changes, and I was able to push successfully after that. So despite all the indications there was a problem on the server, in this case it apparently was indicative of some oddity in the local repo.

Arun Chaudhary · Answer 8 · 2014-07-31T06:52:22.013

3

I was getting this error because every time a user push some content, the group of the file changed to the user. And then if some other user tried to push into the repository, it caused permission error and the push was rejected. So one need to ask your sysadmin to change the settings of the repository so that group of any file in the repository is not changed for any push by any user.

To avoid such problem, please ensure that when you initialize your git repository, use the command "git init --shared=group".

edited Jul 31 '14 at 06:52

answered Jul 31 '14 at 06:40

Arun Chaudhary

277
3
13

for more explanation you can see the link http://stackoverflow.com/questions/16183345/file-ownership-group-is-changed-when-users-push-to-a-git-repository – Arun Chaudhary Jul 31 '14 at 06:45

score 2 · Answer 9 · answered Feb 14 '14 at 00:08

After you add some stuff... commit them and after all finished push it! BANG!! Start all problems... As you should notice there are some differences in the way both new and existent projects were defined. If some other person tries to add/commit/push same files, or content (git keep both as same objects), we will face the following error:

$ git push
Counting objects: 31, done.
Delta compression using up to 2 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (17/17), done.
Writing objects: 100% (21/21), 2.07 KiB | 0 bytes/s, done.
Total 21 (delta 12), reused 0 (delta 0)
remote: error: insufficient permission for adding an object to repository database ./objects  remote: fatal: failed to write object

To solve this problem you have to have something in mind operational system's permissions system as you are restricted by it in this case. Tu understand better the problem, go ahead and check your git object's folder (.git/objects). You will probably see something like that:

<your user_name>@<the machine name> objects]$ ls -la
total 200
drwxr-xr-x 25 <your user_name> <group_name> 2048 Feb 10 09:28 .
drwxr-xr-x  3 <his user_name> <group_name> 1024 Feb  3 15:06 ..
drwxr-xr-x  2 <his user_name> <group_name> 1024 Jan 31 13:39 02
drwxr-xr-x  2 <his user_name> <group_name> 1024 Feb  3 13:24 08

*Note that those file's permissions were granted only for your users, no one will never can changed it... *

Level       u   g   o
Permission rwx r-x ---
Binary     111 101 000
Octal       7   5   0

SOLVING THE PROBLEM

If you have super user permission, you can go forward and change all permissions by yourself using the step two, in any-other case you will need to ask all users with objects created with their users, use the following command to know who they are:

$ ls -la | awk '{print $3}' | sort -u 
<your user_name>
<his user_name>

Now you and all file's owner users will have to change those files permission, doing:

$ chmod -R 774 .

After that you will need to add a new property that is equivalent to --shared=group done for the new repository, according to the documentation, this make the repository group-writable, do it executing:

$ git config core.sharedRepository group

https://coderwall.com/p/8b3ksg

score 2 · Answer 10 · edited Jul 28 '14 at 22:47

2

sudo su root

chown -R user:group dir

The dir is your git repo.

Then do:

git pull origin master

You'll see changes about commits by others.

edited Jul 28 '14 at 22:47

john_science

6,325
6
43
60

answered Apr 18 '14 at 09:05

user3544610

21
1

Aleksei · Answer 11 · 2014-05-07T01:22:06.730

2

Try to do following:

Go to your Server

    cd rep.git
    chmod -R g+ws *
    chgrp -R git *
    git config core.sharedRepository true

Then go to your working copy(local repository) and repack it by git repack master

Works perfectly to me.

edited May 07 '14 at 01:22

answered May 06 '14 at 13:52

Aleksei

1,107
9
13

score 2 · Answer 12 · answered Jun 16 '14 at 04:16

2

you can using this

sudo chown -R $USER:$USER "$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)/.git"

answered Jun 16 '14 at 04:16

Tấn Tâm

130
4

1

What is this doing? Can you add an explanation? – Anubian Noob Jun 16 '14 at 04:32
this will get the top-level directory of your repo, so the command will work regardless of where in your repo you currently are. If you're already in the root you can just run sudo chown -R $USER:$USER .git – Tấn Tâm Jun 16 '14 at 09:59
Edit it into your question. Otherwise your question is pretty useless. – Anubian Noob Jun 16 '14 at 14:53

score 2 · Answer 13 · answered Oct 03 '14 at 22:37

2

Have you try sudo git push -u origin --all? Sometimes it's the only thing you need to avoid this problem. It asks you for the admin system password - the one you can make login to your machine -, and that's what you need to push - or commit, if it is the case.

answered Oct 03 '14 at 22:37

Filipe Fernandes

277
2
5

This worked in my case. – Chagai Friedlander Dec 26 '21 at 15:59

score 2 · Answer 14 · edited Jan 19 '18 at 11:54

2

 user@M063:/var/www/html/app/.git/objects$ sudo chmod 777 -R .git/objects
 user@M063:/var/www/html/app/.git/objects$ sudo chown -R user:user .git/objects/

edited Jan 19 '18 at 11:54

usr_11

548
10
31

answered Oct 24 '17 at 05:25

Mohd Bashir

949
1
8
17

scipilot · Answer 15 · 2012-10-15T03:16:55.863

2

If you still get this error later after setting the permissions you may need to modify your creation mask. We found our new commits (folders under objects) were still being created with no group write permission, hence only the person who committed them could push into the repository.

We fixed this by setting the umask of the SSH users to 002 with an appropriate group shared by all users.

e.g.

umask 002

where the middle 0 is allowing group write by default.

edited Oct 15 '12 at 03:16

answered Jan 31 '12 at 02:09

scipilot

6,681
1
46
65

Are you sure there is such command in Unix or Linux? Because I am quite certain that umask is not location-specific. – Jan Hudec Oct 10 '12 at 12:05
Yes, I'm sorry you're right - I don't know why I thought it had an extra directory parameter. It simply applies to the user. I've updated the comment. – scipilot Oct 15 '12 at 03:17

score 1 · Answer 16 · answered Apr 10 '12 at 03:09

1

Since the error deals with permissions on the object folder, I did a chown directly on the objects folder and it worked for me.

answered Apr 10 '12 at 03:09

n00shie

1,741
1
12
23

score 1 · Answer 17 · answered Jul 15 '13 at 00:53

I guess many like me ends up in forums like this when the git problem as described above occoures. However, there are so many causes that may lead to the problem that I just wanna share what caused my troubles for others to learn as I already learned from above.

I have my repos on a Linux NAS from sitecom (Never buy NAS from Sitecom, pleeaaase). I have a repo here that is cloned on many computers but which I suddenly was denied pushing to. Recently I installed a plugin so that my NAS could stand as a squeezebox server.

This server scans for media to share. What I did not know was that, possible because of a bug, the server changes the user and group setting to squeeze:user for all files it looks into. And that is ALL files. Thus altering the rights I had to push.

Server is gone and proper rights settings are re-established and everything works perfectly.

I used

chmod -R g+ws *
chown -R <myuser>:<mygroup> *

Where myuser and mygroup off-course must be replaced with proper settings for your system. try git:git or gituser:gituser or something else you might like.,

score 1 · Answer 18 · answered Dec 17 '09 at 01:42

1

OK - turns out it was a permissions problem on GitHub that happened during the fork of emi/bixo to bixo/bixo. Once Tekkub fixed these, it started working again.

answered Dec 17 '09 at 01:42

kkrugler

8,145
6
24
18

what happened and how did you fix it? I know it was awhile ago... any ideas? – Metagrapher Jan 06 '12 at 15:48
1

It was an issue on GitHub's side - so I don't know exactly what they did to fix it, just that "Tekkub" at GitHub said "I fixed the permissions" and then it worked. – kkrugler Jan 06 '12 at 18:34
Cool. Thanks for the info. I wound up re-cloning the repo. Suboptimal, but it worked. Cheers! – Metagrapher Jan 09 '12 at 17:09
4

We, uh, we fixed the *glitch*. So he won't be receiving a paycheck anymore, so it'll just work itself out naturally. – Alan Feb 17 '12 at 23:36

score 1 · Answer 19 · answered Mar 06 '14 at 22:22

Check the repository: $ git remote -v

origin  ssh://git@example.com:2283/srv/git/repo.git (fetch)
origin  ssh://git@example.com:2283/srv/git/repo.git (push)

Note that there is a 'git@' substring here, it instructs git to authenticate as username 'git' on the remote server. If you omit this line, git will authenticate under different username, hence this error will occur.

score 1 · Answer 20 · answered Jun 27 '14 at 12:18

In my case there were no unified authentication (e. g. within the domain + AD-like service) between my machine and git virtual server. Therefore git users and group are local for the virtual server. In my case my remote user (which I use to login into remote server) was just not added into remote git group.

ssh root@<remote_git_server>
usermod -G <remote_git_group> <your_remote_user>

After that check the permissions like it's described in the posts above...

score 1 · Answer 21 · edited Aug 18 '12 at 16:12

1

This works:

sudo chmod -R gituser.gituser objects

edited Aug 18 '12 at 16:12

Conner

30,144
8
52
73

answered Nov 09 '10 at 07:19

eeepage

27
1

1

No. `chmod` changes the file permissions and needs modes as arguments, not users and groups. It's either `chmod -R ${some_octal_num} bla` or `chown -R ${some_user}:${some_group} bla` – Dennis Winter Apr 28 '16 at 19:03

Error pushing to GitHub - insufficient permission for adding an object to repository database

21 Answers21

Linked