Using git log on a bare git repository with remote name in revision

Question

I've been experimenting with git worktree and found some weird issue. Maybe it has to do cloning the repository as --bare.

$ cd ~
$ git clone --bare https://github.com/actions/checkout.git

The checkout repository has a remote called origin:

$ git remote -v
origin  https://github.com/actions/checkout.git (fetch)
origin  https://github.com/actions/checkout.git (push)

In upstream projects I usually have multiple remotes and I like to look at the logs of each remote by doing git log origin/main for example.

Let's do that in the bare repository:

$ cd ~/checkout.git
$ git log origin/main
fatal: ambiguous argument 'origin/main': unknown revision or path not in the working tree.
Use '--' to separate paths from revisions, like this:
'git <command> [<revision>...] -- [<file>...]'

Why is that?

Even when I create a worktree for a hotfix I get the same error:

$ cd ~/checkout.git
$ git worktree add -b hotfix ~/checkout.git/hotfix main
$ cd ~/checkout.git/hotfix
$ git log origin/main
fatal: ambiguous argument 'origin/main': unknown revision or path not in the working tree.
Use '--' to separate paths from revisions, like this:
'git <command> [<revision>...] -- [<file>...]'

Adding the -- separator from the help also doesn't help:

$ git log origin/main --
fatal: bad revision 'origin/main'

Answer 1

Thank you @matt for you comments. They were helpful.

I don't know if this is the way one is supposed to be using worktrees but if I want to create a worktree for a hotfix based on origin/main and use the really remote branch notation origin/main I can do it like this.

$ git clone https://github.com/actions/checkout.git
$ cd checkout
$ git worktree add -b hotfix ../checkout-hotfix origin/main
$ git worktree list 
$ git worktree list
/home/kwk/checkout         72f2cec [main]
/home/kwk/checkout-hotfix  72f2cec [hotfix]

This is solving my problem.

Answer 2

You can't do this (at least not in any obvious way):

1. Clone a bare repository
2. Use multiple remotes

Because (as matt explained) a bare repository doesn't have remotes. So there isn't a way to reference different remote-tracking branches.

(As a side-note though you can have (1). Using worktrees with a bare repository works fine. But you can't both of these.)

You don't explain why you want a bare repository. I'll just assume that you don't want to waste disk space on using a worktree in a directory which contains the repository when you won't be using it.

First of all you will need a non-bare repository. But the working for that repository (for the main worktree) doesn't need to take up any space. You can do that by creating a branch which has an empty tree:

git clone <name>
cd <name>
# Use a branch name that you won't need
git switch --orphan unborn-in-the-usa
git clean --force -xd
git commit --allow-empty --message=Init
# Add more remotes
git remote add <name2>
git remote add <name3>
# Start making worktrees
git worktree add -b hotfix ~/checkout.git/hotfix main

This setup will only use a tiny amount of more disk space compare to a bare repository since the main worktree will have an empty worktree.