Jackson Bates

Fixing the fatal: not a git repository error on terminal start-up

A tiny paper cut I've had for a while is that every time I start up the terminal (iTerm2, to be exact), I get a pesky error message before I've even done anything:

fatal: not a git repository (or any of the parent directories): .git

I use oh-my-zsh and I was aware it was somewhat related to that, but when I decided to dig into it the actual cause was my own trying to be clever.

The reason you see this error message usually is that you are trying to run a git related command in a directory that doesn't have a .git directory in it.

Launching straight into your $HOME directory, which is hopefully not a git repo in its own right, and running git status for example would show this same error.

If you see it on terminal start up, it means that something in the background is trying to call a git function. Likely candidates are your .bashrc or .zshrc depending on what you prefer.

The culprit in may case was a little alias I'd added which deletes all local git branches except the master branch and whatever current branch I'm on:

alias branch-prune="git branch -D $(git branch | grep -v 'master\|*')"

The real problem here is $(git ...) which use command substitution to fill in the details of the branches I want to delete. The command substitution runs the git command, even when only used in an alias...which I didn't realise!

To fix this, I added the same logic but as a little function (in a small custom plugin for Oh My Zsh instead):

function branch-prune() {
  git branch - D $(git branch | grep - v 'master\|*')
}

This does the same thing, but only runs the offending command substitution when I need it, not on start up.