Git hook: "fatal: not a git repository:"

Question

I have a similar setup to the one I'm creating on a new server, so I know the 'principle works'. I have a Git post-receive which looks likes this:

#!/bin/sh
git --work-tree="~/public_html" --git-dir="~/repo/website" checkout master -f

I have checked ten times that these are existing and correct folders :-)

To set up the Git repo I ran the following commands:

cd ~/repo/website
git init --bare
# Added content to post-receive file
chmod +x hooks/post-receive
# Verified that these permissions are set on the file

I have added (pushed) some content to the repo for testing purpose. Now, when I try to execute the command for testing with this command:

cd ~/repo/website && bash hooks/post-receive

I get this error:

fatal: not a git repository: '~/repo/website'

I then tried to completely delete the repo and make it from scratch. But on the 4th attempt I'm starting to think it's not the way forward ;-)

I read on related Stackoverflow threads that maybe the HEAD file was corrupted. However, it looks fine - and has also been re-made four times together with the other from-scratch attempts.

It's for deployment reasons I need to set the work-tree, etc. It works fine with the same setup on other servers.

I hope someone has a good idea how to resolve this. Thanks!

Answer 1

The shell expands ~/ only when it is at the beginning of a word. You have it in the middle of a word.

You should write

#!/bin/sh
git --work-tree="$HOME/public_html" --git-dir="$HOME/repo/website" checkout -f master

On top of that, since ~ appears inside double-quotes, the character counts as "quoted" and would be left unmodified regardless of whether the shell could guess that --git-dir= has some special meaning.