OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory on GitPython

Question

I am using GitPython to fetch a remote repository to my machine. The following code works well on my Ubuntu 12.04 but on my amazon ec2, on a Ubuntu 11.10 server, I get the OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory error.

 repo = git.Repo.init(fs_path)
 origin = repo.create_remote('origin',repo_url)
 origin.fetch()
 origin.pull(origin.refs[0].remote_head)

When I run the block in a script, I don't get any error messages. But when I try these steps on Interactive shell I get this stack trace:

>>> import git
>>> repo = git.Repo.init("/var/wwww/dir/subdir/tmp/12")
Traceback (most recent call last):
 File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
 File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/GitPython-0.3.2.RC1-py2.7.egg/git/repo/base.py", line 656, in init
 output = git.init(**kwargs)
 File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/GitPython-0.3.2.RC1-py2.7.egg/git/cmd.py", line 227, in <lambda>
 return lambda *args, **kwargs: self._call_process(name, *args, **kwargs)
 File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/GitPython-0.3.2.RC1-py2.7.egg/git/cmd.py", line 456, in _call_process
 return self.execute(call, **_kwargs)
 File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/GitPython-0.3.2.RC1-py2.7.egg/git/cmd.py", line 335, in execute
 **subprocess_kwargs
 File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 679, in __init__
 errread, errwrite)
 File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 1239, in _execute_child
 raise child_exception
OSError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory
>>> 

But I have no such issues on my local machine. No idea what's going wrong. Any help will be highly appreciated!

• masnun: the path exists and python can access it

Answer 1

The error is coming out of the subprocess module. This suggests that git is either not installed on your EC2 instance or is in a location that is not in your PATH environment variable.

Note that GitPython depends on the git command-line tools. If you want a native Python module for interacting with Git repositories, take a look at dulwich.

• masnun: I just found that out myself and came here to answer the question. Yes, indeed I didn't have git installed and that was causing the error. Thanks for your prompt reply. I just wish Gitpython emitted a more meaningful error message/exception. If a library depends on an external tool, the first thing the library should do is to check if the dependency is installed. Had a tough hour with this. Thanks again!