Question

On our server we have, for each project, 2 folders: /repository and /htdocs. Htdocs being a clone of repository, which is the bare repo. Every developer has his own repository clone to work in. htdocs is there to preview the project to project managers.

I would like to set up a post-receive hook that automatically updates htdocs when updates are pushed from the developers.

I have following in my post-receive hook:

#!/bin/sh
GIT_WORK_TREE=../htdocs git pull origin master

However, when I push, I see following error:

Can anyone tell me what’s going wrong?

Note that

#!/bin/sh
GIT_WORK_TREE=../htdocs git checkout -f

works, but this is kinda slow (as the project is pretty big). It is also possible someone made some bugfixes in htdocs that would get lost with checkout -f if they weren’t committed.

Answer 1

This should work:

 GIT_WORK_TREE=../htdocs GIT_DIR=../htdocs/.git git pull origin master

If you don’t specify GIT_DIR, git believe the repo is still “repository” (the bare repo), which might not have a remote named “origin” (hence the error message).