Git - fatal: unable to checkout working tree - laravel

Question

I uploaded my Laravel project to a shared server, now I am trying to clone the project from a local computer and I am getting the following error:
error: invalid path 'public/C:\xampp\htdocs\pfuxelacolab\storage\logs/laravel.log'
fatal: unable to checkout working tree
warning: Clone succeeded, but checkout failed.
You can inspect what was checked out with 'git status'
and retry with 'git restore --source=HEAD :/'
Help Please...

Answer 1

You have a repository with a commit that you, personally, cannot use on your system. A Linux user can use this commit, but you can't.
The problem here is the file's name:
public/C:\xampp\htdocs\pfuxelacolab\storage\logs/laravel.log
In a Git commit,1 there are no folders: files simply have long names like this one. Each forward slash / in a committed file's name—and only the forward slashes—will, on a Windows system, be turned into the appropriate backwards slash \ and Git will break up the path into pieces such as public and laravel.log and so on.2 Git will then do what your OS demands: treat each of the various pieces as folder-and-file parts, and make any folders needed so that it can create your OS's idea of a file named laravel.log in your OS's idea of a folder. Git itself doesn't hold with such silly notions: you just have a file with a long name with forward slashes in it, but OSes have these dumb and silly folder-and-file requirements, so, okay, Git will deal with it.
In any case, this file's name includes C: right in the middle—not up front, where some DOS/Windows software might be able to deal with it, but in the middle, after public. So Git is trying to create a new folder, named either C: or C:\xampp\htdocs\pfuxelacolab\storage\logs, within a public folder, and that is never going to work: Windows says you can't do that. Linux, by contrast, says Oh you'd like to create that as a folder name? Sure, done!
So, someone on a Linux or similar system can check out this commit. Having done so, they can fix the file's name or remove the file entirely and make a new commit that doesn't have this bizarro name with the colon and backslashes inside it. Remember, Git demands forward slashes. It will make forward slashes for its own commits, from the OS's folders and files. But it will also take any file names with embedded colons and backslashes found on a Linux system, and make a commit from those, that can't be extracted on a Windows system. That's what someone did: they created a folder named C:\xampp\htdocs\pfuxelacolab\storage\logs in a folder named public, and created a file named laravel.log in that, and then added that to Git's index and committed it, presumably on a Linux system.3
The easiest way for you to deal with this will be to boot up a Linux system (perhaps in a VM) and check out the commit in question and make a corrected one to use instead. Whether you can do this at all in WSL, I have no idea.
1Technically, this claim is true not of the commits themselves, but of Git's index. But commits move "through" the index on the way out to your working tree, and are made from the index, so the condition applies anyway.
2Since I don't use Windows, I don't know whether Git will try to break apart the backslashed pieces here too—but it won't matter because of the C: part. It would be interesting to create a file named test\path/file on a Linux system, commit it, and try to check that commit out on Windows, though. Does Windows Git make a test folder? If not, does it (whether intentionally or merely accidentally) use an existing test folder and make a path folder? But Windows forbids colons in path names, and the embedded C: part, with or without any subsequent part, is the first and fatal problem here.
3While I keep saying "Linux" here, any OS that allows this will suffice, so Solaris or one of the BSDs would do the trick too. You could even do this on macOS.