git · Git
The message
Updates were rejected because the remote contains work that you do not have locally.
What it means
This is the explanation behind a rejected push: the remote contains work your clone does not have, and pushing now would remove it. It appears when several people share a branch, or when you edited and committed a file in the web interface and never pulled it down. git pull --rebase origin main first, then push, and it goes straight through. Adding --force in defiance of this hint does exactly what the hint exists to prevent: the other person's commits vanish from the server, and if nobody fetched after they pushed, they exist nowhere.
The fix
git pull --rebase origin main- Printed by
- git
- Git
- 29
Almost every git error is a refusal that means "doing that from this state would lose something"; fatal: means git stopped without changing anything, and the hint: lines under the first line usually carry the actual remedy.
Reading an error message
- Read from the first line down. The lower you go the more it is about the tool’s internals; the cause is usually at the top.
- If there is a file and a line number, start there — not the top stack frame, but the topmost line that names a file you wrote.
- Search the message verbatim, but strip your own paths and variable names first; those are what stop the search from matching.
- The same condition is worded differently across tool versions. If results look wrong, add the version number to the query.
- Before pasting a fix, check what it throws away. Some of these cannot be undone.
Common questions
Q. What does “Updates were rejected because the remote contains work that you do not have locally.” mean?
This is the explanation behind a rejected push: the remote contains work your clone does not have, and pushing now would remove it. It appears when several people share a branch, or when you edited and committed a file in the web interface and never pulled it down. git pull --rebase origin main first, then push, and it goes straight through. Adding --force in defiance of this hint does exactly what the hint exists to prevent: the other person's commits vanish from the server, and if nobody fetched after they pushed, they exist nowhere.
Q. How do I fix it?
git pull --rebase origin main — before running it, check the explanation above for what this command discards.
Q. Which tool prints this?
git. It sits under Git, and the message runs to 14 words.