Lazygit stuck in “Rebasing” state when .git/rebase-merge is partially written

[Frimi01]

Describe the bug

Lazygit enters a permanent rebase state and becomes non-functional, even though Git itself reports that no rebase is in progress.

Attempting to abort, skip, or continue the rebase from lazygit results in the following error: `Warning: Could not read '.git/rebase-merge/head-name': No such file or directory

`Restarting lazygit only opens it up in the same state.

Deleting the following manually immediately resolved the issue:

rm -r .git/rebase-merge
rm .git/ORIG_HEAD

To Reproduce

I have not been able to reliably reproduce this issue.

It happened while interacting with the latest commit (using e or s in lazygit). Subsequent attempts using the same steps did not trigger the issue, and the rebase could be aborted normally.

Expected behavior

Consistent and graceful error handling or ability to abort rebase.

Screenshots

Version info:

$ lazygit --version
commit=, build date=, build source=nix, version=0.57.0, os=linux, arch=amd64, git version=2.52.0

$ git --version
git version 2.52.0

Additional context

At the time of the issue, the .git/rebase-merge/ directory existed but contained only a single file. The expected head-name file was missing.

Initially I suspected this might have been triggered by a permission error while editing a file during the rebase. However, after further testing (including intentionally creating directories without write permissions), I was unable to reproduce the issue, so this may not be directly related to permissions.

I am running on NixOS, and this occurred shortly after checking for updates.

[stefanhaller]

I have also (very occasionally) seen these symptoms in the past, but I haven't been able to figure out how I got into this state. In order to do something about it, we'd need a more concrete reproduction recipe.

[Frimi01]

I agree with you, though while it'd be hard to try and fix the issue without clear reproduction steps, the issue seems to require an interrupted or partially written rebase state, where .git/rebase-merge/ exists but required files like head-name are missing. I'm not too familiar with the inner workings of git but I think lazygit might at least be able of detecting that there's been an issue, and try to resolve or retry. For example offer a similar workaround as what worked for me.