Xcode stops fetching Swift packages
Today, Xcode 16.1 suddenly stopped fetching Swift package dependencies, with a Fatal: cannot use bare repository warning. Let’s see how to fix it, in case it starts happening to you.
I’ve used Xcode 16.1 for a while, without any Swift package problems. This problem appeared out of the blue, and stopped any external packages from being loaded. I tried resetting the package cache, cleaning the build folder, deleting derived data, rebooting, etc. but nothing helped.
I eventually found this thread, in which people notice that SourceTree (my visual git client of choice) seems to have added a new configuration to the global ~/.gitconfig file:
[safe]
bareRepository = explicit
Removing or commenting out this from the file, then restarting Xcode seems to fix the problem for several persons in the thread. I tried it, and it sure enough worked for me as well.
I however don’t know what this configuration does, so please share any unwanted side-effects that disabling this configuration may have.