Fixing Git Upload Pack Not Found

I’ve only just realised that blogging about problems is a great way of delaying doing the thing I intended to get done in the first place.

I’ve just changed the location of git repositories on my server so that instead of living in a directory belonging to the user ’tom’, they now live in the home directory belonging to ‘git’.

Basically, it means when I create a new repository on my server I don’t have to remember:

git remote add origin tonchan:Development/git/path/to/things/zomg/long/

But after setting up the new user and copying the repositories, I tried to alter the remote to point at the new location:

tom@binky:custard:master$ git remote add origin git@tonchan:custard.git
ash: git-upload-pack: not found
fatal: The remote end hung up unexpectedly

¿Qué. Well git is most certainly on the path for the user ‘git’, but the non-login shell clearly loads its path from somewhere else. To test this out I tried:

ssh git@tonchan echo \$PATH

Sure enough:

/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/syno/bin

Git isn’t in any of those places.

There is an easy way to fix this I found in the ssh man page:

Additionally, ssh reads ~/.ssh/environment, and adds lines of the format “VARNAME=value” to the environment if the file exists and users are allowed to change their environment.

So I created the file ~/.ssh/environment and set the correct path in it. Presto, git was happy immediately.

tom@binky:custard:master$ git remote show origin
* remote origin
  Fetch URL: git@tonchan:custard.git
  Push  URL: git@tonchan:custard.git
  HEAD branch: master
  Remote branch:
  master tracked
  Local branch configured for 'git pull':
  master merges with remote master
  Local ref configured for 'git push':
  master pushes to master (up to date)