Git Push error: refusing to update checked out branch

here are two types of repositories: bare and non-bare

Bare repositories do not have a working copy and you can push to them. Those are the types of repositories you get in Github! If you want to create a bare repository, you can use

git init --bare

So, in short, you can't push to a non-bare repository (Edit: Well, you can't push to the currently checked out branch of a repository. With a bare repository, you can push to any branch since none are checked out. Although possible, pushing to non-bare repositories is not common). What you can do, is to fetch and merge from the other repository. This is how the pull request that you can see in Github works. You ask them to pull from you, and you don't force-push into them.

Update: Thanks to VonC for pointing this out, in the latest git versions (currently 2.3.0), pushing to the checked out branch of a non-bare repositories is possible. Nevertheless, you still cannot push to a dirty working tree, which is not a safe operation anyway.

83down vote

I solved this problem by first verifying the that remote did not have anything checked out (it really was not supposed to), and then made it bare with:

$ git config --bool core.bare true

After that git push worked fine.