What does the git error message "Server does not allow request for unadvertised object" mean?

Solution 1:

jgit - What is git's advertised refs? - Stack Overflow:

During a fetch, the server can list references that it has and that the client may wish to fetch. These are the advertised references.

• It looks like you cannot directly get any single specific commit from the server, only refs (i.e. branches and tags). Or rather, that Github servers are configured to disallow such requests.

• So, if you want to get a specific commit with --depth, it must be at most <depth>-1 commits away from the fetched ref (which is the branch/tag specified in the submodule's metadata)

  _{Typically, folks advise to just set depth to some number reasonably large but still much smaller than the total number of commit in the repo -- like 50 or 100. E.g. 50 is what Travis uses when doing the initial clone for the project.}

If you aren't updating the submodule with --depth, failing to find the commit would mean any of:

• the submodule's tree is in "shallow" state and the above applies (only possible when it was previously updated with --depth or its entry in .gitmodules has shallow = true)
• the commit is not on the branch that the submodule is using
• the commit is not in the submodule's repo at all:
  • either someone made a mistake,
  • or it was once there but was deleted by a forced push

For the record, in your specific case, it was the last case: commit 5bbcdc5df9d01b521e8da011bab0da70bdec3653 is not in the https://github.com/simsong/http-parser.git repo at all.

Solution 2:

One way to get access to an unadvertized object is to sync. Then a submodule update should work, like:

git submodule sync --recursive
git submodule update