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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-14T14:13:41+00:00

I recently set up a new account with github. I’m following a Rails tutorial

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I recently set up a new account with github. I’m following a Rails tutorial from Michael Hartl online ( http://www.railstutorial.org/book#fig:github_first_page ) and followed his instructions to set up my git which were also inline with the setup instructions at github. Anyways, the “Next Steps” section on github were: 

  mkdir sample_app
  cd sample_app
  git init
  touch README
  git add README
  git commit -m 'first commit'
  git remote add origin git@github.com:rosdabos55/sample_app.git
  git push origin master

I got all the way to the last instruction (git push origin master) without any problem. When I entered that last line into my terminal, however, I got this error message:

fatal: No path specified. See ‘man git-pull‘ for valid url syntax.

What might I be doing wrong?

Here are the contents of .git/config (reconstructed by Jefromi from the output of git config -l pasted into a comment below):

[user]
    name = Ross
    email = [REDACTED]
[core]
    editor = gvim -f
    repositoryformatversion = 0
    filemode = true
    bare = false
    logallrefupdates = true
[remote "origin"]
    url = git@github.com:
    fetch = +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I’ve stated this in the comments to another answer, but it’s really the answer (and I’ve edited the appropriate section of the comments into the question where it belongs).

    The URL for the remote was not configured correctly, for whatever reason. It’s set to “git@github.com:”, which is clearly missing the path, producing precisely the error you see. You need to reconfigure it correctly. You could simply edit .git/config, changing the appropriate line to contain the path. Or you could do this:

    git remote rm origin
git remote add origin 'git@github.com:rosdabos55/sample_app.git'

    You almost certainly made some small typo or careless mistake when you added the remote the first time – perhaps you hit enter in the middle of it, perhaps you typed a space after the colon. (For some reason, git does not appear to throw an error when you provide an extra argument after remote add <name> <url> – it just ignores it.) The upshot is that you didn’t actually run that command, and you added a remote with an incomplete URL.

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