git - Github remote push pack size exceeded

Question

I am new to Git and have a fairly large project that I want to push to a remote repo (Repo B) on Github. The original project was on Github as well but from a different repo (Repo A). I have to make some changes to files from Repo A before I can setup the project up on Repo B. I have setup the remotes, ssh keys etc. and I run into an issue when pushing the codebase to Repo B.

I get the following error all the time:

$ git push <remote_repo_name> master
Enter passphrase for key '/c/ssh/.ssh/id_rsa':
Counting objects: 146106, done.
Delta compression using up to 4 threads.
Compressing objects: 100% (35519/35519), done.
fatal: pack exceeds maximum allowed size00 GiB | 154 KiB/s
fatal: sha1 file '<stdout>' write error: Invalid arguments
error: failed to push some refs to '[email protected]:<repo>.git

I changed the following settings in my local gitconfig

git config pack.packSizeLimit 1g
git config pack.windowMemory 1g

... and ran git gc (which I see reorganized the packs so that each pack stayed within the packsize of 1GB). This did not work and I get the error seen above.

I tried to lower the size of each pack as well ....

git config pack.packSizeLimit 500m
git config pack.windowMemory 500m

... and ran git gc (which I see reorganized the packs so that each pack stayed within the packsize of 500MB). This did not work either and I ran into the same error.

I am not sure of what Github's default packsize limits are (if any). The account is a micro account if that matters.

Answer 1

The packsize limit does not affect git protocol commands (your push).

From git-config under pack.packSizeLimit:

The maximum size of a pack. This setting only affects packing to a file when repacking, i.e. the git:// protocol is unaffected.

When executing a push git will always create exactly one pack no matter the size!

To fix this use two (or more) pushes:

git push remoteB <some previous commit on master>:master
...
git push remoteB <some previous commit after the last one>:master
git push remoteB master

These pushes will all have smaller packs and will succeed.