Visual Studio is not recognizing git repo

Question

Upon opening my ASP.NET Core project with an existing git repo in Visual Studio 2022, the git repo is not being loaded. However, opening a freshly cloned repo of this project from GitHub works fine. And opening other projects with git repos work fine. What could be the issue?

Substratosphere

Can you open that folder in a command prompt and do a git status and tell us what it says? – Metaphosphate

@DanCsharpster It shows the standard output of a git status command. And it shows that I am on the develop branch. But, oddly, replacing the .git folder in the freshly cloned project with the .git folder in the existing project works fine in Visual Studio. – Substratosphere

So, It's something in the project itself that is causing this problem. – Substratosphere

And just to be sure, are you opening this project as a Visual Studio project, solution or a folder? – Metaphosphate

That's weird about the .git folder. I would suggest using a diffing tool like WinMerge and comparing the two folders to look for differences. – Metaphosphate

I also started running into this problem yesterday, so I did a repair on the install and now none of my local repos are recognized. Just says "One or more errors occured" – Kinchen

@DanCsharpster I'm opening the .sln solution file. I'll use a diffing tool to see the differences. – Substratosphere

@trker: wow, "one or more errors occurred" is a really awful message. What errors? :) Seriously, maybe it's saving the actual errors to a log file or other hidden location? This does appear to be a VS issue though, since Git itself seems to be fine with these. – Lankford

Did you update Visual Studio to the latest version? I guess it is broken for me too. I updated VS 2022 and it also didnt recognise my repo. It works fine in 2019 and not in 2022. – Racoon

@PankajNikam Yes, I did update it recently. This could be one source of the problem. – Substratosphere

github.blog/2022-04-12-git-security-vulnerability-announced Run git update-git-for-windows – Introgression

Looks like a VS 2022 17.2.0 preview 3 problem. VS can't read any of my git repos. But the cmd line git says the repos are fine. – Oppress

I ran the git windows 2.35.2 update and I still have the same problem VS 2022 even just had a new update (17.1.5) which did not help either. I have the same "open or more errors occurred" as well. Just fantastic. – Ratio

Answer 1

Had the same issue after upgrading to latest version of VS2019 and had a look at the output from "Source Control - Git", there were messages of a fatal error because of no access and suggesting running the following:

git config --global --add safe.directory path/to/repo

After running it and restarting VS2019 it works OK.

Blunk

It's worth mentioning that the "path/to/repo" MUST to be specified using (Unix style) forward slashes and not (Windows style) backslashes. – Letsou

This worked for me. It might be worth it to add that the command will need to be ran from a command prompt that was run as administrator. Also, I copy pasted the full command from the output > Source Control - Git window. The suggested command used ' instead of " to wrap the directory. I got a git error: error: wrong number of arguments, should be 2 I determined that this error was because my directory has a space in it. I replaced the single quote with a double quote, and it worked after that. – Inevitable

Answer 2

If you run VS 2022 as an Administrator, it should load everything as it should.

Rolling

I had granted options to launch VS as administrator. Then later on updated VS, and git stopped working. But your answer helped to figure out why - after update, I had to set option to launch VS as administrator again. Thanks. – Grunt

Note that this is a big security risk. Visual Studio runs all sort of code, including your own and any third-party packages it might depend on... It's better to not give Visual Studio too many privileges. – Whaleback

@Sjlver, true, but in most cases you will have to run it as an admin anyway, if you want to debug your application. If you have any concerns about what VS is running in the background, you should be careful which packages you are adding to your solution. – Rolling

@Rolling you can debug most applications without being an admin. Either way: Other solutions for this question are better; users should simply own their project directories. – Whaleback

Answer 3

Had the same problem running VS2022 under Win10. Problem was that the ownership of the file system directory containing the solution and git data had changed to Administrator. After changing the ownership back to my normal windows user account everything worked fine again.

Monmouthshire

In my case it was due to my user account changing domain, and Windows not recognising that the two were equivalent, but this answer gave me a big enough clue as to what the problem was - thanks – Probabilism

Answer 4

In my case the project was cloned in console with Administrator rights. All worked good in console but Visual Studio was not read the .git folder.

Actually folders has enough rights for Authenticated Users group that was assigned for all child objects but Visual Studio still not see .git folder.

Only after change owner of project folder and all child objects to current account Visual Studio seen .git

Steps:

1. Open Properties of project folder.
2. On tab Security select button Advanced.
3. Select tab Owner and button Change.
4. In List select your account plus check "Replace owner on subcontainers and objects".
5. Click Apply

Parasitic

I had cloned my repository originally when running VS as administrator and when trying to run as a non admin, nothing loaded. These steps worked perfectly and VS 2022 can now see my git repo. – Pap

Worked for me. Same issues. Admin user. I forced the permissions to my windows user and set VS to ALWAYS run as admin. Seems to have done the trick. Really wish VS / Win 11 would report "user permission errors" so the user can identify permission issues more quickly. – Weft

Answer 5

I ran into the same problem.

Visual Studio Code and Git bash correctly recognized the repo but not Visual Studio 2022.

I installed the latest version of Git in the system, and the visual studio recognized the git repo correctly.

Berty

Intrestingly, updating git was out of all solutions presented here, the only on that worked for me – Eminence