git pull remote branch cannot find remote ref

If none of these answers work, I would start by looking in your .git/config file for references to the branch that makes problems, and removing them.

I faced the same issue because GitHub changed the default branch name from master to main so git pull origin master did not work for me.

try this
git pull origin main If the issue is due to a branch name conflict, this will save you.

If the remote branch was deleted (or renamed), then you might get such error when trying to fetch that old-branch:

$ git fetch --prune --all

  Fetching origin
  fatal: couldn't find remote ref refs/heads/old-branch
  error: Could not fetch origin

Check your local git config if it still refers to the old-branch:

  $ git config --get-all remote.origin.fetch

    +refs/heads/*:refs/remotes/origin/*
    +refs/heads/old-branch:refs/remotes/origin/old-branch
    +refs/heads/master:refs/remotes/origin/master

Removing the old refs entries, can fix the fetch problem:

$ git config --unset-all remote.origin.fetch

$ git fetch --prune --all
  Fetching origin
  ...
   * branch            HEAD       -> FETCH_HEAD

In my case, this error occurred due to the naming changes made by Github for the default branch from master to main

So instead of using,

git pull origin master

You may use,

git pull origin main

check your branch on your repo. maybe someone delete it.

For me it was failing because my remote branch was missing (it was deleted on previous merge run.)

In my case I had got the capitalisation wrong on the branch ABC-100 when I did git checkout abc-100 which I then worked on. My solution was to merge code from abc-100 into ABC-100 and then delete abc-100.

In my case I had a branch in my local branches that was removed from the server

just remove it from the local branches and pull will works as expected

The problem occured for me because (I think) someone tried to clone a repository from a folder on our server into the same folder. This created a ".git" folder in the repository I tried to clone and broke everything. Deleting the ".git" folder in the repo I wanted to clone fixed it.

It's possible that you created a new repo and did not have a readme.md created with it. This can result in the online repo not having a default branch set. You can manually add a readme.md in github or gitlab and then a master/main branch should be created.

You may also be able to set a default branch in the settings. In my case I was not able to do the latter so I had to do the first and then I was able to push to origin -main.

I had this issue when after rebooted and the last copy of VSCode reopened. The above fix did not work, but when I closed and reopened VSCode via explorer it worked. Here are the steps I did:

//received fatal error
git remote remove origin
git init
git remote add origin git@github:<yoursite>/<your project>.git
// still received an err 
//restarted VSCode and folder via IE 
//updated one char and resaved the index.html  
git add .
git commit -m "blah"
git push origin master

Hiii, I just solved this problem thanks to these comentaries.I'm a newbie so just a tiny addition since this question was solved 7 years ago the new standard for the "the principal bratch" in git and github is no longer master but rather main this is generating some broke parts on stackoverflow for old code, you can the Github announcement about that here: Renaming the default branch from master

Because of that first verify with what name are managing your "principal branch" with git show-ref assuming you are using Git Bash. If you are watching an old tutorial or old book this might be the cause.

what should appear should be:

$ git show-ref
3fba1252f165a909f14dd63e1177c543659dffd6 refs/heads/**main**
9264e8f4193fa1be7ccb5780059bc67f68cf107e refs/remotes/origin/**main**

if you see master in one of those change it to main, if not skip this part:

$ git branch -m master main
$ git push -u origin main

Anyway worked for me was this:

$ git pull origin main --allow-unrelated-histories 
$ git push -u origin main 

In my own case, I just made the change from "master" to "main" and I was able to pull from the remote repo.