Git shallow clone missing history or tags

What this failure means

The CI job performed a shallow Git clone and a later step requires full commit history or tags. Tools like semantic-release, lerna, changelog generators, and tag-based version bumps fail because the expected refs are absent.

Symptoms

Faultline looks for one or more of these log fragments:

shallow update not allowed
fatal: shallow file has changed since we read it
git fetch --unshallow
unshallow
No names found, cannot describe anything
fatal: No tags can describe
You need to fetch more history
does not contain any version tags

Diagnosis

actions/checkout (and most CI checkout actions) default to fetch-depth: 1, which fetches only the most recent commit. Any step that needs to walk the commit graph, resolve a tag, or compute a version from git history will fail.

Common downstream failures:

• git describe returns an error or a wrong result because no tags are reachable.
• semantic-release, standard-version, or lerna version cannot determine the last release tag.
• Changelog generation tools produce empty output because no prior commits are visible.
• git log from the tool returns only a single commit.
• A git fetch --tags or git unshallow step is missing in the workflow.

Fix steps

1. Set fetch-depth: 0 in the actions/checkout step to fetch the complete history and all tags:

   - uses: actions/checkout@v4
     with:
       fetch-depth: 0
   

2. If you only need tags (not the full history), fetch tags explicitly after a shallow checkout:

   git fetch --tags --force
   

3. For self-hosted runners or other CI systems, replace the shallow boundary with a full fetch:

   git fetch --unshallow
   

4. If the workflow runs in a detached HEAD state, confirm the branch name is also available to the versioning tool:

   git checkout -B "$BRANCH_NAME" HEAD
   

Validation

• git log --oneline | wc -l returns more than 1.
• git describe --tags resolves without error.
• The versioning tool produces the expected tag or version string.

Try it locally

git log --oneline | wc -l
git describe --tags
git describe --tags
git log --oneline | head -5

How Faultline detects it

Use faultline explain git-shallow-checkout to see the full playbook.

faultline analyze build.log
faultline explain git-shallow-checkout

Generated from playbooks/bundled/log/ci/git-shallow-checkout.yaml. Do not edit directly.