Git branch cannot lock ref while creating a new branch
I just encountered a Git error yesterday. I was trying to create a branch in some_branch/feature/ticket. But Git thrown the following error,
fatal: cannot lock ref ‘refs/heads/some_branch/feature/ticket’: ‘refs/heads/some_branch’ exists; cannot create ‘refs/heads/some_branch/feature/ticket’
Initially I didn’t understand it. Because I already created similar kinda branches like dev/hemath/feature. But this time it didn’t work. So I did some research on the internet and found a great underrated answer in Stackoverflow. Check it out.
https://stackoverflow.com/a/71216915
As the comment says, I already have a branch named some_branch, and it has some commits. The way Git works internally is, it’ll create directories and files as per branch names.
So in my case, it should’ve created some_branch/feature as directories and put the ticket as a file at last. But as some_branch is already there not as a directory but as a file. So Git cannot just create a directory with the same name and also cannot convert this some_branch as a directory.
The solution
If it’s okay to delete that branch, then delete and create branches in the desired format. In my case, I cannot do that as many people are working on that. So I had to change my format to some_branch-ticket/feature