My Repository Suddenly Broke! Here’s How I Fixed It

Yesterday, I was mildly working on one of my GitHub repositories, making solid progress, when disaster struck. Just as I was about to git push my hard-working changes, my repository… broke. Completely.

At first, I thought, “Oh no, what did I mess up this time?” Cue the classic facepalm of frustration.

After all the crying I turned to AI for a solution.

However, the suggestions I got from ChatGPT were… not very intuitive. I read through them, skeptical but hopeful, and decided to give them a shot anyway.

The first suggestion was to run the command:

git fsck --full

This stands for “Git file system check,” and I’ll admit, it was my first time using it. Unfortunately, the command brought nothing.

And then, next step was:

git fetch --all

This command forces your local repository to synchronize with the remote one. The catch? I’d need to back up all my changes, replace my current files with the older commit, and then manually restore my updated files. The thought alone was exhausting, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that there had to be a better way.

Determined, I kept searching. And that’s when I discovered a lifesaver: git repair, a complement to git fsck. You can read about it here.

This tool worked like magic. In just three simple commands, my frustrating problem was rgone:

sudo apt install git-repair  
git-repair

And just like that, my repository was back in action.

git-repair usage

Lessons Learned

(While researching the issue, I also learned something surprising: some Ubuntu distros had been randomly breaking user repositories. Why? Only the tech gods know.)

What I want to share is what I extracted from this simple situation:

  1. Not every AI-generated solution is reliable. If you feel that something is not quite right or true, trust your gut and keep digging.
  2. Not every scary problem is as complicated as it seems. Often, there’s a simpler fix than you might expect.
  3. DevOps mindset. Optimizing your time is always the path.

Take a deep breath, stay curious, and keep troubleshooting—you might be just a few commands away from a solution!