Bamboo Gradle build fails with “fatal: No names found, cannot describe anything"

[Brian Mansfield]

I've inherited a Bamboo build that runs deploys on a remote agent. When I run it, the build in Bamboo is marked as "successful," but the deploy task is eventually skipped due to a fatal exception - here's a snippet of the logs:

build   17-Jan-2019 10:25:33    Starting a Gradle Daemon (subsequent builds will be faster)
build   17-Jan-2019 10:25:39    :cleanPackage UP-TO-DATE
build   17-Jan-2019 10:25:39    :copyFiles
build   17-Jan-2019 10:25:39    diffTarget: SIT
error   17-Jan-2019 10:25:39    fatal: No names found, cannot describe anything.
build   17-Jan-2019 10:25:39    build.gradle
build   17-Jan-2019 10:25:39    :deploy SKIPPED
build   17-Jan-2019 10:25:39    
build   17-Jan-2019 10:25:39    BUILD SUCCESSFUL

The Bamboo build is setup to check out a repository, then run a task called deploy:

It looks like the issue may be happening when checking out the repository (I am completely new to Gradle, so would be happy to even have this validated/refuted). One other thing to note is that in the build.gradle file, I have Bitbucket creds, but I intentionally switched bewteen invalid credentials and working credentials, and the output was the same - so I'm thinking it's not something specific to this repository itself.

Does anyone have any suggestions/where I should look to troubleshoot? Anything is helpful, even if it's validating that this is likely a Git config issue, and not something else. Let me know if there's any other information I should include - like I said, I'm a total novice with this :)

[Brian Mansfield · Accepted solution]

To anyone that stumbles across this, the issue had nothing to do with Bamboo itself - the Gradle script was making a `git describe --tags` call, but the repository had no tags defined.

(I failed to include the necessary Gradle snippet in the original question, here it is for reference):

 result = exec{
   commandLine "git", "describe", "--tags", "--match", "$diffTarget-*", "--abbrev=0"
   standardOutput = stdout
   ignoreExitValue = true
 }

[Daniel Santos]

Hi @Brian Mansfield,

I was searching for that error

No names found, cannot describe anything.

and found that could be related to a shallow clone configuration in repository configuration. Do you mind checking the repository configuration for this plan and making sure you have the option [ ]Use shallow clones unchecked?

Other question:

Have you tried to run the same gradle build from outside Bamboo (on server terminal) to make sure this problem is only happening when you run within Bamboo?

[Brian Mansfield]

I really appreciate you answering - "use shallow clones" was unchecked, yes. It wasn't a problem with Bamboo - the build script was making a `git describe --tags` call, but the repository had no tags defined.