Clone a github repo into a private gitlab repo

Question

I am trying to pull a repo from github and push it up to a private repo on a gitlab server that I am running.

I cloned the github repo to my local machine

git clone  https://github.com/somepage/someproject

at that point I added a new remote (my gitlab)

git remote add gitlab https://mygitlabserver/mypage/myproject

then I pushed (in this case only branch on githab was develop)

git push gitlab develop

Now I am running into problems when I try to clone from my gitlab repo:

git clone https://mygitlabserver/mypage/myproject
Cloning into 'myproject'...
remote: Counting objects: 140, done.
remote: Compressing objects: 100% (85/85), done.
remote: Total 140 (delta 40), reused 140 (delta 40)
Receiving objects: 100% (140/140), 2.75 MiB | 1.85 MiB/s, done.
Resolving deltas: 100% (40/40), done.
Checking connectivity... done.
warning: remote HEAD refers to nonexistent ref, unable to checkout.

Not 100% what that warning is about, but I am sure its not good. If I list the contents of that cloned dir its empty.

What did I do wrong?

http://stackoverflow.com/a/15631690/6309 can help too. – VonC Apr 03 '15 at 14:20 — VonC, Apr 03 '15 at 14:20

score 11 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 03 '15 at 14:20

I suspect you are getting that error because the default configuration of a repository in gitlab is to have a default branch name of master. You have only pushed a branch named develop, and when you clone the repository git is attempting to checkout the nonexistent master branch.

You can:

go into the repository settings in gitlab and set the default branch to develop,
or you can just name the branch master,
or you can provide -b develop to the git clone command,
or after cloning you can simply git checkout develop.

You are correct. Seems like gitlab has no idea what to do if the default branch is not master. Thanks! — lostintranslation, Apr 03 '15 at 14:33

Clone a github repo into a private gitlab repo

1 Answers1