Here's the situation : some commits have been done in a remote repository.
Unfortunately, someone did push -f such that no remote branch references these commits anymore.
To make matters worse, I don't have those commits in my local clone.
My goal is basically to recover those commits. These are some of the things I tried :
git checkout -b recovery <commit_id> : fatal: reference is not a treegit push origin <commit_id>:recovery
error: refs/heads/recovery does not point to a valid object! error: unable to push to unqualified destination: recovery The destination refspec neither matches an existing ref on the remote nor begins with refs/, and we are unable to guess a prefix based on the source ref.
The problem is that your local repository doesn't have that commit id.
git checkout -b recovery <commit_id>
git push origin <commit_id>:recovery
Both of these commands fail for that reason, I get the exact same messages with a GitHub repo if I use a commit id that doesn't exist locally.
I thought the answer will be simply fetching the lost commits locally, in one of these ways:
git fetch origin #1
git fetch origin SHA1 #2
git fetch origin SHA1:refs/remotes/origin/recovery #3
Unfortunately none of these work. It seems #2 used to work as of Git v1.4 according to this answer. As of now, it doesn't work anymore.
There is a help page for this on GitHub, but with no answer that you can use: it basically says that if you have the commit locally you can create a branch from it and push it. Yeah, but if you don't have the commit locally then what? It doesn't answer that.
I can think of two options:
git log SHA1. If anybody has it, they can create a branch from it with git branch recovery SHA1 and then push it.recovery branch for you.