Summary
I recently lost the ability to make any changes using Git on my Windows system. After a few days of not using my PC I come back to a non functional git so I have no idea what caused this issue.
Examples:
git add or git checkout => fatal: Unable to create 'dummy-repo/.git/index.lock': No such file or directory
git clone => fatal: could not create work tree dir 'DummyRepo': No such file or directory
As a side note, this problem occured after trying to start my Flutter application, which could not retrieve the packages because of an OS error where access was denied. I'm thinking this is either because of some write permissions being messed up or a certain process locking a file.
What I've tried so far:
Closing all files and rebooting PC
Uninstalling and reinstalling Git
Run Git Bash as an administrator
Changed system write permission to my user account for all files
Any help is appreciated!
On Windows, this may happen if you enabled the "Ransomware protection" in Setting > Windows security > Virus & threat protection.
You need to add an exclusion for git.exe, or move the project outside a protected folder.
I've solved it myself by changing the location of my project to C:\ instead of a way longer path. This was never a problem before but it works so I'm happy.
I did 2 things:
I found that there was a file named 'index' in '.git/' directory. I made a copy of it, and renamed the copy as 'index.lock'.
Under 'Ransomware protection', I temporarily switched off 'Controlled folder access'.
Problem solved.
After I am done, I switched 'Controlled folder access' back on.
Try creating that file in your .git directory, you can use these commands in Git Bash or linux/mac
cd .git
touch index.lock
On Windows CMD
cd .git
type nul > index.lock
I've installed openssh for windows and when I run ssh localhost I get
Bad owner or permissions on C:\Users\gary/.ssh/config
I've looked at these 2 questions https://superuser.com/questions/348694/bad-owner-or-permissions-error-using-cygwins-ssh-exe and https://serverfault.com/questions/253313/ssh-returns-bad-owner-or-permissions-on-ssh-config but none of the answers work for me. sshd is running as a service as the Local System user. I've run chmod 0600 C:\Users\gary\.ssh\config and chown gary C:\Users\gary\.ssh\config. I've also cleared the ACL by running setfacl -b C:\Users\gary\.ssh\config and then chmod 0600 C:\Users\gary\.ssh\config again. I've also tried changing the owner to SYSTEM and got the same error.
I'm not sure what else to do, is there anything wrong with my setup? I also have git installed which installed mingw, I deleted ssh and sshd from my git installation so they wouldn't be on my path.
Other commands I've run are
icacls "C:\Users\gary\.ssh\config" /setowner gary
chown -R gary:1049089 C:\Users\gary\.ssh
ls -la C:\Users\gary\.ssh\config shows
-rw-r--r-- 1 gary 1049089 229 Jan 3 14:43 'C:\Users\gary.ssh\config'
it keeps showing this even after changing the owner to SYSTEM, but in the file properties in file explorer it shows SYSTEM as the owner
This started popping up immediately after I created another user with Administrator privileges, and that account began inheriting access to my .ssh folder.
You do not need to change your permissions whatsoever.
Just go to .ssh, right-click Properties, Security Tab, Advanced. DISABLE INHERITANCE, then click on the Administrator user (the one that is not you) and Remove them. Apply. Done.
Use ssh client from Git instead of Windows inbuilt SSH client. E.g. set VS Code to use C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin\ssh.exe instead of C:\Windows\System32\OpenSSH\ssh.exe.
Steps:
In VS Code navigated to [File] -> [Preferences] -> [Settings] -> Search remote.ssh.path
Input C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin\ssh.exe
Alternatively:
Update PATH environment variable to point to Git bin before Windows System32.
Type "env" in Start bar to edit System (or account) environment variables.
Select Path and hit edit.
Add C:\Program Files\Git\usr\bin\ssh.exe to the list and move it to the top of the list.
Just got same issue after re-install windows. And easily fixed just by changing the file permissions to
SYSTEM & Administrators - Full Control
[your username] - Modify & as Owner
Note:
I'm still using Windows 10 built-in SSH client C:\Windows\System32\OpenSSH\ssh.exe & not using cygwin at all
For those still struggling with this, check this out: https://github.com/PowerShell/openssh-portable/pull/418. This was the case for me. It turns out that your computer should be named differently from your username... 🤷‍♂️ It will probably be fixed soon in future updates, because fix got into commit.
So again: if your computer name is the same as your username and you still haven't fixed this issue with permissions dialog, then probably renaming your computer could help.
Instead of using the properties box, you can use the one liner:
icacls .ssh /grant:r <yourUserName>:f /inheritance:r
/grant:r username:f -> grant and overwrite permissions, giving full permissions to username
/inheritance:r -> remove inherited permissions
Keep known_hosts writable with
icacls .ssh/known_hosts /grant:rw <username>:f /inheritance:r
I'm not sure what version of Windows you're running, but since this is recent I'd guess Windows 10. I recently found out that an OpenSSH client is installed by default as of the April 2018 update. I then found I had two instances of OpenSSH: the one I installed myself and the one Windows gave me. Uninstalling the one I had installed caused the error message you describe.
The solution that worked for me was to remove the user-installed OpenSSH as well as the C:\Users\username\.ssh folder, and let Windows 10 OpenSSH create the folder when you run the command the next time. I didn't have any configuration I was worried about losing, but if you do I'd suggest copying and pasting the contents of the files somewhere and recovering them afterwards.
Hope this helps!
Having the exact same issue today, this is how I solved it:
Go to C:\Users\username.ssh
Right-click the config file
Properties -> Security -> Advanced -> Disable Inheritance -> Disable
inheritance -> Remove all inherited permissions from this object ->
Apply -> Yes -> Ok -> Ok
Use FixUserFilePermissions.ps1 to fix permissions of client side files - keys and config files of current user.
git clone git#github.com:PowerShell/openssh-portable.git
cd openssh-portable/contrib/win32/openssh
.\FixUserFilePermissions.ps1 -Confirm:$false
On windows server this is due to permission problem. Need to remove access to other users for the following folders
.ssh - folder
Right click on this folder -> Select "Give access to" - > Click on "Remove Access"
Right click on this folder -> Select "properties" - > "Securities" - > Click on "Edit Permissions" - Remove other users except the ID you are logged in.
Repeat the same process for the folder under which you have .pem file. (Note: Keep .pem file in a separate folder)
For anyone, who still has troubles after applying the owner + modify (plus full control for admins): it did not work for me. Then I saw a solution to remove all other users (incl all admins), which did not help either.
This worked for me:
leave System and Administrators in place, with full control, as suggested above
leave the user itself in place, as owner, with modify, as suggested above
however, remove any other user or group. You probably need to go to advanced first, to disable inheritance of rights
after I removed an administrative user who was added by Windows after entering my folder (by passing through the UAC box), it worked for me again.
Hope this helps for anyone who encounters this specific issue :-)
If User is in Administrative group just keep configuration in
c:\programdata\ssh\ssh_config instead %USERPROFILE%.ssh\config, will work
after disabling inheritance, make sure you add your current user, else u cannot edit the file
For me it was fixed by running chmod 0644 config under ~/.ssh/. Earlier it was set to 755 which was causing "Bad owner or permissions on /home/home/.ssh/config"
I tried all the solutions above, and sadly still can't fix this issue. I'm pretty sure the permission of my ssh config is correct, this has been verified by the Explore GUI and the Get-Acl commands.
Then I finally find a way to solve it:
delete the entire .ssh folder and then open powershell and type ssh localhost. It will create a new .ssh folder for you, then you can apply the above permission tweaks(for me I only did one thing: disable inheritance).
So if other solutions doesn't work for you, maybe you can try this. Hope it's helpful.
PS: don't forget to backup your old .ssh folder before deleting it.
I was having this problem, and no amount of changing permissions or disabling inheritance on the config file would fix it. It turned out that it did not like my computer name and user name being the same, so I re-named my computer, allowed open ssh to re-create the config file, and the permissions are now correct. That was probably a bad idea to begin with, tbh.
I deleted C:\Users\user/.ssh/config and reran my stuff, then it worked.
However, if you have something valuable there, make a backup first, just in case!
After a domain change over, I started having this same problem. Went through all of the suggestions listed and nothing worked, including both chmod and chown solutions.
I ended up fixing the problem by copying the folder, pasting it, deleting the original, and then renaming it back to .ssh.
The problem seems from the files are owned/has-permission for more than one user.
1- Go to your ./ssh folder and for both config & id_rsa files. From the properties -> Security -> Advanced:
2- Make sure that the user that you are logged in with IS the only user there.
No group change or whatever,the first answer is right.Change to git ssh.exe
How?
uninstall win10's openssh in Settings
add path of git's ssh.exe to your Path
For me it was fixed by running chmod 0644 config under ~/.ssh/ when running WSL.
Rename the config file to something like config2
Open this file with notepad
Save As config (original name)
This worked for me.
I guess it was caused by the wrong path expression.
Bad owner or permissions on C:\Users\gary/.ssh/config
The /.ssh should be \.ssh. So I try to use git bash (the terminal tool when install git in Windows system) to run ssh command. It really works. But I don't really know if it is caused by the reason I guessed.
Hi guys after a troubleshoot for a day I found that this "m.. f.." config file should not stand in the .ssh/ path.
For VSCODE just set the config in 'C:\ProgrmaData\ssh\ssh_config' path as proposed in the second choice of the palette command, and forget .shh path for this configuration.
That worked fine for me.
Nota: there was also a known_host file also created here with strange VM names inside, I deleted also this file. and that helps
For me, re-editing the permission settings in Windows is too complicated. Regenerating another configuration in vscode does not work either.
I set a custom config file path to solve this problem.
["Remote SSH: Config file"]
The absolute file path to a custom SSH config file.
note: search this option by #ext:ms-vscode-remote.remote-ssh,ms-vscode-remote.remote-ssh-edit config file
This is because the config file cannot be accessed normally. We can create a new config file (this file needs to be accessible normally), such as D:/.ssh/config, and then specify the configuration file through the -F option: ssh -F D:/.ssh/config username#ip_address -p port
Delete the .config file, it has worked for me
I'm looking for help !!
I am getting the following error message when trying to complete a git pull;
C:\Jenkins\Repo> git pull error: cannot open .git/FETCH_HEAD: Permission denied
The machine in question is Windows Server 2008 r2 OS and were using ssh to handle the authentication.
We have tried the following;
Checked that the current user the correct read/write on the FETCH_HEAD file, which it does, also checking that the user has the correct permissions set on the repo root.
I have tried to load my private key (which I know 100% works and has permissions to the repo in question) and still the same issue... so from little I know regarding git I think this is more of a Windows issue
and lots of Google !
Any more ideas on what to do/check would be a great help !
This happened to me after I upgraded to Windows 10. While my user is an administrator and Administrators had full access to the root repo folder, my user was not explicitly listed. I've added my user with Full Control and it solved the problem for me (had the same issue with Outlook refusing to read the PST file until I did the same thing).
So, for me, the solution is:
Right click on the folder, select properties
Security
Edit
Add
Type in my user name
Check Full Control under Allow
OK, OK
On Windows 10 this is what worked for me:
1. go to the repo folder
2. right click on the .git folder and choose the last option - properties
3. on the general tab uncheck hidden checkbox if checked
4. hit apply and then ok
now go try git fetch or git pull and it should work.
This is fairly a common problem. I've come across it many times and almost all of the times, the issue is with the right permissions to the repo/directory .git/ and the right SSH keys to access the git repository.
You probably need to make the user, the owner of the repository chown (Give full access to the user) or, clone the repository to a different directory.
You can set the write permission with the following command
go to your folder chown -R youruser:yourgroup .git/
Also try to un-hide the .git folder.
In my case, this happend because I hide the .git folder by hand(usually it will be hide automatically) but I forgot it.
I have tried edit security but no effect. So I just show the .git folder and solve the problem.
May this can be help for someone
This happened to me because after updating windows.
Kindly try these steps:
Right click on folder -> properties
Under general there are two checkbox hidden and read only -> uncheck the hidden check box and click on apply
Under security -> edit -> add user -> apply
give full access to your user
This will work for you
just remove the folder,and clone again.
What I did was open powershell / command prompt with Administrative rights inside the repository, and I was able to pull / fetch / merge and push.
This problem can also be caused by the caches Jenkins keeps of it's Git operations. I had tried chowning the files I thought were causing the problem, I also deleted the workspace completely.
After deleting %ProgramData%\Jenkins\.jenkins\workspaces\MY-BUILD* I still had the exact same error message.
In %ProgramData%\Jenkins\.jenkins\caches I deleted everything but you could probably just delete the git-<HEX_ID> and git-<HEX_ID>#tmp folders and retry the same checkout. This resolved the issue for me as Jenkins was forced to recreate the .git folder in both the workspace and the cache and the permissions were then correct.
Steps:
Delete the workspace folders of the troublesome job
Delete the Git caches
Retry the job
We're experiencing strange permission issues with SVN after switching from Windows Server 2003 to Server 2008.
On our standard build box there is a folder (C:\SVN_Code_Folder) which AD_User_A associates with a SVN repository using SVN_User and TortoiseSVN 1.7.6
When using Windows 2003, when AD_User_B logs into the box and tries to Update, Switch, Merge the SVN_Code_Folder with SVN_User, the command is executed.
It Windows 2008, it fails with the message:
Command: Update
Error: Working copy 'C:\jboss-4.2.3.GA\server\New folder' locked
Error: sqlite: attempt to write a readonly database
Error: sqlite: attempt to write a readonly database
Completed!
Attempting to unlock the file, which was never locked, via the context menu is met with the following message:
There's nothing to unlock. No file has a lock in this working copy.
I've played with the permissions of the folder and I've discovered that giving "Domain Users" control over the folder fixes the issue, but I would prefer to not have such a broad permissions. I've tried granting the same permissions to individual users and a SVN-group, but these too did not work.
What am I missing?
Is this an improper use of SVN?
Can 2 different Domain users update a folder using SVN without removing the .SVN file?
For future reference...
I had this same problem with some WC's that I copied over to my new laptop's hard drive, from a file share on my old machine.
It turned out that the problem was solved by giving myself (as opposed to all domain users, or any other group) full control over the folder.
Did you check the svn service user on the win2008 machine?
Does that user have local administrator privileges and also have permission to these folders on c:?
After changing anything restart the service.
For me change folder permissions did't help, but I have update for several directories in a batch script so I solved this by
cmd -> Run as administrator -> start update script
Im trying to use git extensions and I really like it so far, but I don't manage to push to github. The following command works fine in git bash:
git push "origin" master:master
and then when I push with git extensions I get this:
C:\Program Files\Git\bin\git.exe push "origin" master:master
Permission denied (publickey).
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly
Done
In the git settings it just has openSSH selected which I would like to keep because putty seems more hassle.
The remote addres I have added in gitextensions, actually the only thing I have done from the bash just to test is the command above and gerenating the SSH keys. All else is set up in git extensions. So I suppose everything must be set up correctly. Eg, the email adress and name are correct...
ssh git#github.com
also connects fine, from bash
edit:
So I can reproduce the error by putting the command from git-extensions in cmd. Appearantly there is a difference between running from git bash and from cmd and git-extensions runs this command like a windows command... any clues?
update:
If I choose git-bash from the menu in git-extensions I get a window that is exactly the same as when I right click in explorer on my repo folder and choose git bash here. Now, in the one opened from explorer I can push and in the one opened from extensions I get the public key problem.
Things to check for:
Presence of HOME environment variable.
Presence of %HOME%\.ssh\ and RSA keys there.
When you run git from command promt it is preferred to run git.cmd, because it fixes HOME automatically:
#if not exist "%HOME%" #set HOME=%HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%
#if not exist "%HOME%" #set HOME=%USERPROFILE%
To fix gitextensions, define HOME variable and set it to same value as USERPROFILE
Ok, I solved it.
I opened the git bash from git extensions and a git bash using the explorer shell extensions. I then ran ssh -vvv git#github.com from both to see the difference.
It turned out that because I changed the location of the git config file ( I tend to reformat every now and then, so c:\documents and settings... is notoriously bad for storing anything I might want to keep persistent), when run from git extensions git was also looking for the ssh keys in a different location. So I added the .ssh folder where my git cofig file is and now it works fine. I think git-extensions sets the HOME variable for git to whatever you set as path for the config file.
Now, that was not obvious...
The correct answer is the one from 'max' (set your HOME env var manually), but it may help some to understand why the problem is happening (as Git gets more users around the world it's going to be very common).
Cygwin sets $HOME to /home/yourname, but that variable is not known in the Windows environment. So if you open a bash window and do env | grep HOME you'll see all three 'HOME' variables mentioned here, and you might wonder why Gitextensions doesn't use your proper cygwin HOME - which is because its .bat file invocation doesn't see it - it only sees what you see from doing 'set' in a windows console.
It's mystifying why it doesn't do this evaluation later and get the proper cygwin path since it knows how to invoke bash, but (at least in versions up to 2.41) you have to do this manual change in the settings or in .gitconfig.
When you fire up git bash directly you'll land in your home folder for MSYS. You need to make sure you have your ssh key (id_rsa ?) in the .ssh subfolder (relative to the home folder).
Glad you solved the problem. Since this sounds like a serious problem I'm interested in the difference between git-bash when started from GitExtensions. In GitExtensions there is a setting that might fix this. The %HOME% directory can be changed in GitExtensios. By default it will be set to %HOMEDRIVE%%HOMEPATH%, but you can override this. Changing this probably solves your problem, since you suggest this is the problem. To change this open the settings dialog and go to the tab "git". In the section "Environment" you can set the %HOME% path.
I will appreciate it if you let me know if this also solves the problem. I'm also interested in what caused this in the first place. Maybe I can improve the check for a valid HOME directory.
Yes, not setting the HOME varible was the issue for me too.
Set the HOME variable as %USERPROFILE% and regenerate the Private and Public keys, then try cloning—it should work now.
I see that the HOME variable is set to USERPROFILE in git extensions. I can add and commit but not push/pull from the remote repository. I am unable to connect to any remote repository. We use http (not ssh) for the connection. However, using git bash I am able to connect to the remote and do push/pull. I had put my issue GIT extensions does not connect to remote but git bash does and was directed to this issue. However, I am unable to resolve my issue. Any ideas?