When developers start using Git as a version controlling system for their projects, they encounter many fatal errors, one of which is “fatal: git refusing to merge unrelated histories”. The solutions to these fatal errors are often complex and situation-based.
What are the Causes of the “fatal: refusing to merge unrelated histories” Error?
This error appears when some of your ambiguous actions confuse Git on how to function further. Typically, when you try to merge two unrelated projects with different commit histories into a single branch, the error pops up. The two histories will remain incompatible since they don’t have common tags and commit message.
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- You create a remote repository that has its own history in the .git directory, and then you create a local git repository that has a different .git directory of its own with the history of your local commits.
Later, after making several commits, you try to pull or merge this local repository to the remote one, and boom, you are hit by the error.
Why so? Because the repositories that you are trying to connect have different .git directories and hence different histories, and Git does not know how these two projects are related to each other.
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- You are also vulnerable to this fatal error if the .git directory inside your project has been corrupted or deleted. In that case, Git loses track of the project because of the absence of history.
How to fix “fatal: refusing to merge unrelated histories” Error?
Git pull origin master –allow-unrelated-histories Here, the origin is to be replaced with the name of your remote repository and master with the branch name that you want to work in.
Conclusion
In this brief yet convenient guide, we discussed one of the most commonly faced Git fatal errors caused by nothing hugely wrong but by little ambiguity in the workflow. The error is simple to resolve with the help of one additional flag embedded with the common Git commands.
We discussed the solution and the causes of the error, and if you are falling in one of the discussed scenarios, this guide must be a go-to way to your problem’s solution.
