git pull fails with "Either the application has not called WSAStartup, or WSAStartup failed"

Question

I have just installed Windows 10, Visual Studio Community 2015, and Git for Windows. I also installed the latest Bitbucket and GitHub extensions.

Within Visual Studio I cloned my Bitbucket.com-hosted repository, and performed these operations successfully:

$ git --version
git version 2.19.2.windows.1

$ git pull
Already up to date.

But then when I tried to pull from another repository I got this error:

$ git pull git://github.com/aegif/CmisSync.git
fatal: unable to lookup github.com (port 9418) (Either the application has not called WSAStartup, or WSAStartup failed. )

I am able to ping github.com though.

How can I investigate and fix the problem?

Jenisejenkel

I'm experiencing similar error if I try to start $ git daemon on my local machine. It fails with similar message for the WSAStartup call and failing to listen on port 9418. I think the issue may be similar, but I have not found any solution yet. Edit: I'm also using the same git version - git version 2.19.2.windows.1 – Homoeo

Answer 1

For those who can't edit the URL, downgrading git to the previous version appears to work.

This seems to be an issue with git version 2.19.2.windows.1

Younger

Correct. Associated GitHub issue: github.com/git-for-windows/git/issues/1952 – Kagu

As mentioned in that GitHub issue, you can also download the latest snapshots which already contain a fix for this issue. Apparently there isn't going to be another proper release until some date in December. – Corr

I've switched to the v2.20.0-rc2.windows.1 version available at github.com/git-for-windows/git/releases and now it works properly. – Barrack

Answer 2

A low-tech workaround is to replace git:// with https:// in the URL.
The command then goes smoothly.

Warnings:

• It only works read-only, so if you might want to push to the repository any time in the future then use PhillyAI's solution instead.
• Please note that while it currently works with GitHub, this trick might not work with other Git servers.

Jenisejenkel

Answer 3

It is a known bug in earlier versions of Git for Windows.

Upgrade/Install version greater than 2.20.0.

You can check currently installed version with command $ git --version

Scutch

Answer 4

I found out there is one more solution, which is to navigate to the .git folder, edit the config file inside this folder changing

[remote "origin"]
        url = git://github.com/yourUsername/yourRepo.git

to

[remote "origin"]
        url = https://github.com/yourUsername/yourRepo.git

fixes the problem if one does not want to downgrade the git client

Felixfeliza