Linux

git: ‘index-pack’ is not a git-command. See ‘git --help’. fatal: index-pack failed

Sunday June 14, 2009 at 6:59pm

I am using capistrano to deploy to a dedicated server. It has been working fine for days, then last night it stopped working.

I investigated the trace and saw this error:

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git: 'index-pack' is not a git-command. See 'git --help'. 
fatal: index-pack failed

So, I signed in to the server and tried to run a few variations of fetching and cloning my repository and other public repositories and got the same error.

Then I decided to sign in as root and another normal user. Those users were able to do git commands with no problems.

After a bunch of work trying to find the difference I discovered that my failing user had:

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echo $SHELL
/usr/local/cpanel/bin/jailshell

whereas my other users had:

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echo $SHELL
/bin/bash

So, I signed in as root and changed my user’s shell to bash and now everything works just fine:

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ssh root@xxx.xx.xx.xx
chsh -s /bin/bash username

Reader Discussion

Tom Mason

Wednesday July 08, 2009 at 2:28pm

Hello,

This is an interesting problem, I’m seeing the same thing also on a cpanel server. I had given the user bash under WHM, but that didnt seem to fix the problem.

Your command did though - so thanks!

Toon Claes

Monday September 07, 2009 at 10:30am

Well I’m having that problem too. But I did install git on a 3th party shared hosting. Git just doesn’t recognize: git index-pack. Not even in the regular ssh session.

An idea?

Chas

Monday November 23, 2009 at 6:57am

THANKS! Was running into the same problem this morning and your solution was exactly what I needed.

dericbytes

Sunday January 31, 2010 at 5:53am

I had the same problem. I solved it by changing my path variable.

Bash solution

$ type -a git
> git is /cygdrive/c/cygwin/bin/git

$ export PATH=/bin:$PATH
$ type -a git
> git is /bin/git
> git is /cygdrive/c/cygwin/bin/git

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