Monday, August 18, 2014

git Error: Unable to find remote helper for https

At my work, my group is (currently) pretty rooted in svn for all of our repository work.  The rest of the company has migrated to using git, but because we are responsible for all of the companies systems, time to switch is not exactly a commodity.

I do use git myself and like it, but when you use it on your own system, you don't always experience all the issues you could (especially since you probably performed all of the necessary pre-installation steps).

On my work desktop I was recently trying to clone a repository using https and received the following error:

  Cloning into gitflow...
  fatal: Unable to find remote helper for 'https'

I was momentarily puzzled by this, knowing I had seen it before, but couldn't remembered what the issue was.  I remembered that git uses curl for cloning via https so I quickly checked and found it already installed.  So, turn to the Google's.  That quick search enlightened me to the fact that the curl-devel package was not installed.

Explanation:  While it says that git uses curl for its https cloning, its actually the development libraries that it makes use of.

So, I needed to do the following since I didn't have them on their when I built git:
  • Install the curl-devel package
  • Find the source code I downloaded and built git from and do the following:
    • ./configure
    • make
    • sudo make install
After doing all of that, git successfully downloads the repository using https.  Do know that the make does take several minutes to run as there is a lot to build.  
 
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