ProcessError: fatal: A branch named 'test-pages' already exists.

[rodneyrehm]

Hey there,

I wanted to test this tool on a local branch before having things thrown at the remote gh-pages. For that reason I created a local branch off of gh-pages and called it test-pages - it has no upstream. When running gh-pages with the following options, I get an error thrown at me

{
  branch: 'test-pages',
  push: false,
  message: 'chore(website): pushing website to test-pages',
}

and the error I see is

{ [ProcessError: fatal: A branch named 'test-pages' already exists.
]
  code: 128,
  message: 'fatal: A branch named \'test-pages\' already exists.\n',
  name: 'ProcessError' }

I have then pushed test-pages to the remote and tried again. This time I did not see an error, however the local test-pages did not contain any updates. I then removed the push: false option and tried again. There was no error, the local test-pages did not show any changes, but the remote test-pages had the proper content!

It is possible I've misunderstood how to use the options branch and push, but at the moment I fear the docs don't match reality.

[lmk123]

Fallback to 0.11.0 resolve this issue for me.

[kevincolten]

If you get this error during a deploy, you might need to empty the cache

rm -rf node_modules/gh-pages/.cache

[BerkeleyTrue]

@kevincolten Thanks. That fixed it

[alireza-saberi]

@kevincolten It is the solution.

[leonorpan]

@kevincolten thanks!

[simonguo]

@kevincolten thanks  😀

[cpietsch]

rm -rf node_modules/gh-pages/.cache fixed it but if you deploy to 2 different branches you will run into this problem again. I ended up doing it like that:

"predeployLive": "npm run build",
"deployLive": "npm run cleanup && gh-pages -d build -b deploy -e build",
"cleanup": "rm -rf node_modules/gh-pages/.cache"

[LeeHao12]

@kevincolten Thank U 👍

[wasabigeek]

In case anyone gets stuck with v3.1.0, the cache directory is now at node_modules/.cache/gh-pages https://github.com/tschaub/gh-pages/blob/v3.1.0/changelog.md#v310