Git and nasty "error: cannot lock existing info/refs fatal"

Question

After cloning from remote git repository (at bettercodes) I made some changes, commited and tried to push:

git push origin master

Errors with:

error: cannot lock existing info/refs
fatal: git-http-push failed

This case regards already existing repository.

What I did before, was:

1. git config –global http.sslVerify false
2. git init
3. git remote add [url]
4. git clone
5. change data
6. git commit

At 'bettercodes' I have no access to git log.

I'm using Windows. The detailed error was:

C:MyWorkStuffProjectsRubyMyProject>git push origin master
Unable to create branch path https://user:password@git.bettercodes.org/myproject/info/
error: cannot lock existing info/refs
fatal: git-http-push failed

I cloned before, then changed the code and committed.

Answer 1

For me this worked (won't change in remote):

git remote prune origin

Since this answer seems to help a lot of people, I dug a little bit into what actually happens here. What this will do is remove references to remote branches in the folder .git/refs/remotes/origin.

So this will not affect your local branches and it will not change anything remote, but it will update the local references you have to remote branches. It seems in some cases these references can contain data Git cannot handle correctly.