Partial stage/unstage operations fail with cryptic error

[Nathan Gray]

When I try to stage or unstage part of a file using the Stage Hunk or Stage Selected Lines button I get the following error:

'git apply' failed with code 1:'error: (null): does not exist in index

'

The last single quote appears on its own line.

I have tried running 'git fsck' on the repo and didn't get anything unusual.

[Jasmine Hegman · Accepted solution]

Follow up, this is fixable by setting Show Whitespace to Ignore Whitespace. Then the apply works. It appears that some of the time the line numbers from whitespace changes affects things negatively. This doesn't always happen, but at least for me this time it fixed it. Hope it helps someone else! :)

[Deleted user]

Still have this issue in 2014, but "Ignore Whitespace" helped. Thank you!

[ollietreend]

Yep - this issue still exists, and this still seems to fix it. For those who aren't sure where the 'Show Whitespace' option is located - look for the small cog icon in the top right corner of the "File Status" view, to the right of the search box. The option is in there.

[Ryan_Draper]

I found the reverse fixed my problem, setting from Ignore to Show. Whatever works I guess.

[Michael Cote]

its 2016 and this is still an issue...

[s g]

Where is "setting Show Whitespace to Ignore Whitespace"?

[RichH]

2017-01-27 16_50_08-SourceTree.png

[s g]

OK, so that not helps.

[RichH]

You're right, that didn't. Not sure what happened there. Let's try again.

[Petr Nagy]

With either Ignore whitespace or Show whitespace checked, this issue still exists in 2020. I'm sorry but how hard can it be to fix?

[Simon Dingley]

The only way I could get around this was to stage all changes to file then unstage the chunks I didn't want to commit.

[Sreeram Ramakrishnan]

This is still an issue in December, 2020; disappointing to say the least!

Anyway, the fix for me was to switch to show instead of ignore.

[Carsten Wegner]

Might also be the character encoding. If you set encoding to e.g. UTF-8 in SourceTree, but save the file in ANSI and have e.g. german Umlaut characters in it. Make sure to use consistent whitespace, character encoding and line-end handling.

[Johannes Luber]

I can confirm this. I merely changed the encoding for a file from ANSI to UTF-8 and now it works. Also I noticed that in ANSI, umlauts weren't shown correctly, merely as the question mark placeholder glyph.

[Jeremiah Small]

Switching to Ignore Whitespace fixed this for me.

[Daniel Rice]

How do you switch to Ignore Whitespace?

[Simon Dingley]

Above the diff view there is a cog icon, click that and you will see the option to show or ignore whitespace differences in the view.

[Joel Stein]

I'm getting this same problem when trying to "Stage Hunk". I don't know how to do the suggested fixes. Will somebody please enlighten me?

[Mark Turner]

I'm also having the same issue:

'git apply' failed with code 1:'error: attak_game.js: does not exist in index'

When trying to "Stage Selected Lines"

[Nathan Gray]

It fails on any file in any repo on my machine. Doing "git add --patch" works properly, as does using the equivalent feature in Tower.

Actually I just figured it out. This feature breaks if you have diff.mnemonicprefix set to true in your git config.

[Thomas Harold]

Try adding the following to your ~/.gitconfig

[apply]
    whitespace = nowarn

[RichH]

Does this allow merges to complete successfully, or just suppress the error and cause the merge to mess your file up? :)

[blueblau]

I tried the above, restarted my machine, and got this slightly different error...

[DimitryDushkin]

Problem still presents.(

[blueblau]

Still... 5.5 years later.

[Joshua Marsh]

This thread is quite old, but I just wanted to stop in and say I still see this issue.

Gotta be line-ending-related; I'm attempting to stage hunks/selected lines on a Windows machine after the source files were last modified on a Unix machine.

Very irritating issue, and none of the fixes in this thread worked for me.

[Tai Lee]

I see this with "Ignore Whitespace" AND "Show Whitespace". I don't have "diff.mnemonicprefix" set in my gitconfig. As far as I can tell, my file just has UNIX style line endings. What's the cause and fix?

[fcorreia]

Despite the workaround, this is very annoying. Hope it get's fix really soon.

[Sebastian Siedentopf]

I see this when end-of-line characters are messed up in a file.

[Jasmine Hegman]

Just wanted to add that I too experience this occasionally. Got it now in a file with several different detected hunks, and none of then can work via apply hunk or apply selected lines, nor can they be un-applied. Only fully staging the file as a whole works.

[Dennis Cornwell]

I'm seeing the same error. Unfortunately, settng both my global and local diff.mnemonicprefix setting to false doesn't solve the problem for me.

[stevestreeting]

Can you give some more details about the file you're trying to do this on? This functionality works in all my tests here.