Git "You have not concluded your merge" and nothing to commit?
GitGit Problem Overview
Whenever I try to push in Git I get this:
You have not concluded your merge (MERGE_HEAD exists).
Please, commit your changes before you can merge.
Running git status I get:
# On branch master
nothing to commit (working directory clean)
Or running git ls-files -u I get nothing.
Running git add .and trying again makes no difference.
What's up?
Git Solutions
Solution 1 - Git
Okay I finally found answer: git commit -m "Test" apparently fixed this. The result was an empty commit with no changes whatsoever. Even Github shows an empty commit, but it works.
Solution 2 - Git
Did you end up with an empty merge commit (two parents) or just an empty commit? In the latter case, you could have deleted .git/MERGE_HEAD.
Update: Rather than delete MERGE_HEAD by hand, you could also use git merge --abort (as of git 1.7.4) or git reset --merge (as of git 1.6.2).
It's also worth mentioning that at least as of git 1.8.3 (maybe earlier?) you should see a status message like this if an actual merge is in progress and needs to be committed (if you specified --no-commit, for example):
# On branch master
# All conflicts fixed but you are still merging.
# (use "git commit" to conclude merge)
#
nothing to commit, working directory clean
If you don't see this and still get the MERGE_HEAD warning, something is messed up and you should probably just --abort to get back to a clean state.
Additional Detail from Comments
During a merge, git creates a MERGE_HEAD file in the root of the .git folder (next to HEAD, ORIG_HEAD, probably FETCH_HEAD, etc) to track information about the merge in progress (specifically, the SHA(s) of the commit(s) being merged into the current HEAD). If you delete that, Git will no longer think a merge is in progress. Obviously, if a merge really is in progress then you wouldn't want to delete this file.
Solution 3 - Git
Use git reset command, without parameters.
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