Application Launcher

Date Published: March 14, 2024

Issue

When trying to deploy code, the task fails and the logs show the error:

"error: unable to create symlink xxx (File name too long)"

Resolution

This error indicates an issue with your committed files. There are two methods to resolve this issue:

Recreating missing symlinks

If you see the symlinks are in your vendor/bin folder the easiest way to resolve this issue is removing the vendor and regenerating it. Make sure to update your your Composer to the latest version.

composer self-update
rm -rf vendor 
composer install

If this is not the case please continue to read:

Create a new branch based on the branch you are reporting issues with, you will need to use -f to force the branch to checkout properly:

git checkout -f feature/example

Create a new branch based on this:

git checkout -b feature/example_2

and recreate the missing symlinks by doing the following, for example:

git rm --cached vendor/bin/var-dump-server
git add vendor/bin/var-dump-server

You should be able to see `typechange` when you are running `git status`:

$ git status
On branch master
Your branch is up-to-date with 'origin/master'.
Changes to be committed:
  (use "git reset HEAD <file>..." to unstage)

	typechange: vendor/bin/var-dump-server

Setting symlinks to false

If you are using a Windows-based Git client, you should be able to fix using the following:

git config core.symlinks false

You can also, set symlinks to false in the core section of .git/config file.

[core]

...........

symlinks = false

Cause

The following source provides details on the cause of this issue:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/18411200/git-unable-to-create-symlink-file-name-too-long.

>>> As soon as you changed the content of a fake-symlink-file without also changing its mode from symlink to regular file and committed the result, you made a blob that can't be extracted on an OS with real symlinks, because you have an object that is supposed to be a symlink but its content is too long to be a pathname. The web interface is not doing you any favors by hiding this problem. You're probably going to have to back up to that commit, fix it, and re-commit everything after it. git rebase -i will help, but it still might not be easy, especially if you've made more changes to the files while they were in this bogus symlink-but-not-really-a-symlink state.

Code deploy failing due to "error: unable to create symlink xxx (File name too long)"

Issue

Resolution

Recreating missing symlinks

Setting symlinks to false

Cause