Git repo cannot be accessed. Please verify the repository exists

I’ve been developing a project which requires me to spin up a lot of roots projects (Trellis/Bedrock/Sage) the past few months. I have a strict process I follow.

For the past few days I’ve been hitting a bug where my sites won’t deploy due to not connecting correctly to my github repo via SSH. The error I get:

TASK [deploy : Failed connection to remote repo] *******************************************************************************************************************************************************************************************
task path: /Users/masoninthesis/Sites/thefutur/trellis/roles/deploy/tasks/update.yml:27
System info:
  Ansible 2.9.9; Darwin
  Trellis version (per changelog): "Support Ansible 2.9"
---------------------------------------------------
Git repo git@github.com:masoninthesis/TheFuturLMS.git cannot be accessed.
Please verify the repository exists and you have SSH forwarding set up
correctly.
More info:
> https://roots.io/trellis/docs/deploys/#ssh-keys
> https://roots.io/trellis/docs/ssh-keys/#cloning-remote-repo-using-ssh-
agent-forwarding
fatal: [thefutur.jackalope.io]: FAILED! => {
    "changed": false
}

At first I thought maybe it was the capital letters I put in the github URL. So I fixed that to no avail.

I found a couple posts on this forum that seemed similar, so I followed all the steps suggested. Especially here by @fullyint

Note that if you test ssh-agent forwarding by running

ssh web@example.com 'ssh -T git@github.com'

When I do this, I get: Permission denied (publickey).
I configure ForwardAgent yes and AllowAgentForwarding, I still get permission denied.

But I think that’s an unrelated issue.

I found the issue for now. I’ll drop it in the next comment so I can mark it as the solution for now.

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I knew the issue might have something to do with my repo, or the URL. I recreated it multiple times. Changed the git url. Changed all letters to lower case. No luck.

I followed a step suggested from the other post above, I commented out no_log: true. This gave me an interesting error I hadn’t seen before:

"error: pathspec 'master' did not match any file(s) known to git."

Followed by the same error I logged above in the OG post. This made me take notice of the master branch. Maybe the branch had been changed somehow?

Then right as I was about to post this as a potential bug, I spotted something unusual in my repository.

On github’s website, my branch was called main branch. Main branch? Wtf? Shouldn’t it be master?

I created a new branch called master, re-deployed, and voila. It worked fine.

I used the Github Desktop app for Mac, mainly because as I’m training others, it’s way easier than having to teach them Git. I think github might have updated the app so that the master branch is called main by default. That seems like a bug to me, but maybe they’re changing things? Either way, I hope this might one day help some other poor soul like myself.

GitHub changed the master branch to main on October 1st, 2020-

For those not using master as the default branch, change this line https://github.com/roots/trellis/blob/a4cbce18b7b5902e033730eb33e732c76c595dd7/group_vars/production/wordpress_sites.yml#L14

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