Question

I cannot find any of the files on my remote repo.

1. Created a Git repo on shared hosting (site5) as described by their tutorial
2. init’d it and added a simple text file. OK
3. Cloned on to my local (WinXP) machine. OK
4. Deleted the test file on my local copy, added a few real files. OK
5. Committed the local changes. OK
6. Pushed to remote server. OK
7. MsysGit threw a few warnings (below), but told me we had success.
8. FTP’d into the remote server, but the files weren’t there.
9. SSH’d in (using PUTTY) and ran git status. It gave me the whole list, but with the word “deleted” preceding each file. See below.

Working off of the cue that I am not on any branch, I checked out the specific commit. It found it, but the files and git status still show nothing doing. It told me:

Note: moving to ‘9c47b5’ which isn’t a local branch

Tried to checkout master HEAD. No luck, it tells me

-jailshell: /usr/bin/git: No such file or directory

---

Git status shows:

[frumwebc@your tanee.com]$ git status
# Not currently on any branch.
# Changes to be committed:
#   (use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)
#
#       deleted:    _notes/dwsync.xml
#       deleted:    contact-us/_notes/dwsync.xml
#       deleted:    contact-us/index.html
#

The warnings were:

warning: updating the current branch
warning: Updating the currently checked out branch may cause confusion,
warning: as the index and work tree do not reflect changes that are in HEAD.
warning: As a result, you may see the changes you just pushed into it
warning: reverted when you run 'git diff' over there, and you may want
warning: to run 'git reset --hard' before starting to work to recover.
warning: 
warning: You can set 'receive.denyCurrentBranch' configuration variable to
warning: 'refuse' in the remote repository to forbid pushing into its
warning: current branch.
warning: To allow pushing into the current branch, you can set it to 'ignore';
warning: but this is not recommended unless you arranged to update its work
warning: tree to match what you pushed in some other way.
warning: 
warning: To squelch this message, you can set it to 'warn'.
warning: 
warning: Note that the default will change in a future version of git
warning: to refuse updating the current branch unless you have the
warning: configuration variable set to either 'ignore' or 'warn'.
Pushing to fru@67......ee.com
To fru@67......ee.com/26d352f..9c47b55  master -> master

Answer 1

When you push to a remote repo in Git, it does not update the working copy of that remote repo. This means that the working copy will be out of sync with the last version that you pushed. To avoid this confusion, it is recommended to only push to bare repos; repos that do not have a working copy. The reason is that if anything in the working copy has changed, you will not have a chance to be warned about this and perform a merge, because you are pushing to a remote repo.

Generally, the only way you should be modifying a working copy is from within it, such as doing a pull or checkout from within that working copy. If you want a copy of your code to be checked out somewhere on your server automatically when you push, you should set up a post-receive hook that will then go a git pull into a repository that has a working copy.