Fixing Git ‘remote: Repository not found’ Error

1. Overview

Git has become an important part of our day-to-day work. It has many great features and keeps on adding new ones. It feels very intuitive once we use it for some time. However, in the beginning, it can be overwhelming, and we might not be able to understand the error messages. One of the most common issues we might face is an error with the remote repository:

remote: Repository not found.
fatal: repository 'https://github.com/profile/project.git/' not found

We get this error message during cloning an existing repository. In this tutorial, we’ll discuss some reasons for this issue and how to resolve them.

2. Authentication Issue

When we get this error, we should check if we’ve authenticated. Sometimes in a hurry, we try to clone from a private repository without authenticating ourselves. We can configure our credentials using the following command if we’ll use this repository frequently:

git config

We can also provide our username and password in the URL while cloning the repository:

git clone https://<username>:<password>@github.com/profile/project.git

3. Credential Issue

It’s quite common that we save our credentials on our local machine so that we don’t need to provide them each time we access our remote repository. Sometimes, we update our repository password and forget to propagate the same on our local machine. We should check if the stored credentials on our local machine are up-to-date.

We can delete or update the credential details in our system by going to Credential Manager on Windows and Keychain Access on Mac.

4. Common Mistakes

There can be a few minor human mistakes that we tend to make that can also cause this issue. We should check if any words are misspelled or any characters are missing. Also, check if the repository exists, it’s not deleted, and we have access to this repository. If we’re missing access, we can ask the repository moderator to give us access.

5. Conclusion

In this article, we’ve learned how to deal with “repository not found” errors and how to fix them.

Configuring Git and cloning an existing repository isn’t very hard. However, skipping steps or blindly following instructions might cause some issues, and sometimes the error message doesn’t make much sense, especially if we’re new to Git.